EnergyFromThorium

I just looked back and realized that I didn’t post a single time in the month of January. For that I apologize–I want you to know that the frequency of posting is not connected to the pace of development in the world of thorium. In fact, it may be just the opposite–the more that is going on the less time there seems to be to make good high-quality postings.

Nevertheless, in an attempt to recapitulate recent developments let me call a few out:

Baroness Worthington discussed thorium in the House of Lords on January 12th as part of a larger discussion on British national energy policy:

Lords debate the government’s green agenda

“I shall end on a discussion of whether the tried and failed technologies that we talk about a lot will deliver, and by that I mean the current generation of nuclear reactors. We often hear the promise that we are going to build eight or even 10 new reactors to replace the ones that are closing. My reading from those whom I speak to in the industry is that there is a great deal of cynicism about this. It is very unlikely that we will see the scale of build that the Government are anticipating because our current reactor designs are simply not attractive. As one executive who had looked at both designs put it to me, “They are both pretty awful and we do not like them”. I think that a nuclear renaissance is possible and indeed desirable, but it will have to be achieved by looking at the full range of new generation nuclear reactors. It will come as no surprise that I shall mention thorium molten-salt reactors, because of all the technologies that I have looked at in relation to climate change this one has huge potential. If we were able to match the amount of money that we are currently spending on nuclear fusion, there is no doubt that we would develop a technology that had massive potential for export. I would like to mention the Lords Science and Technology Select Committee report on nuclear research and development. It is an excellent report and I hope that the Government will respond to it, because we really do need to look again at our spending.”

I particularly like how she juxtaposed the large investments in nuclear fusion, which has never produced a single watt of electrical power with the non-existent investment in fluid-fueled thorium reactors.

While the noble Baroness was defending an advanced nuclear option in the House of Lords, things were changing a great deal for us at Flibe Energy. Kirk Dorius and his family relocated to northern Alabama and I spent several days helping him unpack and get situated into his new home and in our offices at Flibe. But while we were in the middle of unpacking on Saturday the 14th, one of our biggest media exposures of all time was taking place on the TED.com website:

TED.com: Kirk Sorensen: Thorium, an alternative nuclear fuel

George Monbiot is increasingly realizing that so-called “nuclear waste” might have a lot of value, if placed in machines suitably designed to use it:

Monbiot: A Waste of Waste

But others worry about the glut of natural gas and its effects:

CSMonitor: The natural gas glut is reshaping electricity markets

The DOE is announcing financial support for the licensing of small modular reactors:

US DOE launches major funding program for small nuclear reactors

While the Chinese keep visiting Oak Ridge to get more data on MSRs:

Who’s that knocking at ORNL’s front door? Yep, it’s China (again and again)

And finally, in Japan, the mighty nation is laid low yet again, as the shutdown of their nuclear power plants drives them into a trade deficit for the first time in decades.

Reuters: Exporter Japan eyes first trade deficit in 3 decades

Energy from Thorium reader Raul Parolari thought that some of our posts should be presented in other languages, so he offered this translation to French.
French translation follows…

In the recent Nuclear Ammonia article post, ammonia was illustrated as a fuel that could propel vehicles in a zero carbon era. Despite our best efforts in developing new internal combustion engines and direct ammonia fuel cells, there will continue to be a role for carbonaceous fuels. Gasoline and jet fuel have double the volumetric energy capacity of liquid ammonia. A given fuel tank can only contain half as much ammonia combustion potential energy as gasoline combustion potential energy. Fuel tank size is very important in aircraft. Decades of engineering of airframes and turbine engines have optimized aircraft performance using diesel-like JP8 jet fuel.
Click to read full post…

Eifion Rees wrote an article for the Ecologist and later republished it in the Guardian. The article was called “Don’t believe the spin on thorium being a ‘greener’ nuclear option.”

I wrote a rebuttal to the article here.

I would tend to agree with Mr. Gates:

“In a conversation with Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson today at the magazine’s third annual Business Conference, Gates said that one of the best aspects of nuclear power at the moment is its lack of innovation thus far, which leaves it ripe for disruption in the coming years.”

Full article at VentureBeat.

LFTR can be that disruptive technology that he seeks, and it will be much simpler to engineer and operate than the travelling wave reactor, because its thermal-neutron spectrum requires 10-15 times less fissile fuel per unit of electrical output than the fast-neutron spectrum of the travelling-wave reactor or the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR).

Great visual depiction of the magnitudes of radiation exposure from Scientific American.

We are climbing out the Great Recession. US gross domestic product (GDP) is the value of all produced goods and services in a year. In the Great Recession GDP dropped from an annual rate of  $14.48 trillion to $14.03 trillion, a productivity hit of $450 billion, or a 3.2% decrease.

In 2010 the US generated 4.12 PWH (peta watt hours) of electricity to power our economy. That’s 4.12 million thousand kilowatt hours. The average wholesale price of electricity varies from about 4 cents in Texas to 6 cents in New England; let’s say it’s about 5 cents per kWh. The value of 4.12 PWH at 5 cents/kWh is $206 billion, or 1.4% of GDP.

Renewable electric power is expensive. The $2.2 billion Cape Wind project will generate 468  MW of peak power. Average power will be about 30% of that. The capital cost will be $2.2/.468 or $4.7 per peak watt of generating capacity — about the same as today’s new nuclear power plants (which operate 90% of the time). The wind turbines may operate 30% of the time, resulting in a capital cost of $15/watt ($4.7/.30). The capital cost recovery alone (@8% over 40 years) is 15 cents/kWh. To make Cape Wind successful the State of Massachusetts requires utilities to buy wind-generated electricity at 19 cents/kWh, rising annually to 31 cents/kWh — provided all Federal subsidies continue. Similar costs arise in other wind and solar projects.

What would be the impact of 31-cent power on GDP? It raises the cost of the same electricity from 1.4% to 8.7% of GDP, removing (8.7 – 1.4) 7.3% of productivity from our economy.

If you thought the Great Recession was bad with a 3.2% productivity hit, are you ready for a 7.3% GDP hit from 31-cent renewable power?

Last night I was flying back from speaking at TEDxYYC to Alabama and I had a bit of time on my flight, so I watched a program that I had recorded on PBS a few days earlier.

It was called “Plan-B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” and it focused mostly on the work of Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, as he travelled the world and particularly through Asia discussing how climate change would affect food production, and ultimately, civilization.

The program began with what has become fairly standard fare in these types of programs, describing how fossil fuels have filled the atmosphere with CO2 and all the terrible things that will entail…I’ve seen all that before, many times.

I wanted to know about the solution set–what would Mr. Brown propose to do about it?

The answer was also unsurprising. Nuclear was dispatched in a single sentence as “too expensive.” That was the beginning and the end of the entire discussion on nuclear power. No consideration of how to change that fact, no allowance for any new technologies. Too expensive. Move on.

The tone of the music changed. It went from heavy and ominous to light and hopeful. Glorious computer-generated images of endless rows of offshore windmills appeared, all of them steadily rotating in the computer-generated breeze. These windmills were backlit by a setting sun. Golden light, an artist friend used to tell me, was the key to making everything beautiful. Golden light.

Then there was more optimism. Endless arrays of solar panels. Then the extruded parabola of the parabolic-trough solar concentrator. Even geothermal was included in the joy, with billowing white clouds of steam emerging from a plant nearly shrouded in white. The music told us what we needed to know–that this was good, virtuous stuff, and it was Going To Save Us.

I wish I shared the optimism. Because despite the computer-generated images of the high-speed rail cars moving through a landscape of windmills, the numbers just don’t add up. Solar and wind are too diffuse to be economical and too intermittent to be dependable. Geothermal is just thorium energy with a bad heat exchanger and a long time scale.

Matt Damon’s impassioned narration made it clear that Mr. Brown was absolutely committed to saving the world from the doom that lies ahead of us if we don’t change our ways. I ended the program wondering if I should email him about thorium/LFTR.

I’m still wondering and would appreciate your advice.

Kirk Sorensen’s note: I’d like to introduce my friend and colleague Kirk Dorius to the Energy from Thorium community. Kirk Dorius is a mechanical engineer and intellectual property attorney.   I welcome his insights into the technology that underpins today’s solid-fueled uranium reactors.

A typical solid nuclear fuel rod includes a zirconium alloy tube or “cladding” encasing a single column of uranium fuel pellets. The cladding tube is smaller in diameter than your index finger, and is about 14 feet long. The uranium pellets are each about the size of the tip or your pinky finger, with the energy equivalent of 17000 cubic feet of natural gas, 1780 pounds of coal or 3.5 barrels of oil. The pellets are stacked in the tube with allowance for pellet expansion during fission and heating of the uranium. Once the uranium pellets are loaded into the cladding tube, zirconium end caps are welded in place to form a complete loaded fuel “rod.”

The fuel rods are then arranged in “bundles” or “fuel rod assemblies”, e.g., 14×14 or 17×17 arrays, which are then inserted into the core with a number of control rods being retractable from the bundle to initiate fission and insertable into the bundle to stop fission. Many rod bundles are oriented vertically in the reactor core with a substantial flow of water passing upward through the bundles to convey the fission reaction heat to a steam turbine for generation of electricity.

The zirconium cladding serves to hermetically isolate the uranium pellets and accumulated fission byproducts from exposure to the water flow in the core or cooling tank  or to the atmosphere. The thin-walled cladding is transparent to radiation but is naturally affected by the high heat stresses and heat loading in the core.  The rods are preemptively retired after a finite core cycle of several years to maintain cladding integrity even though only a very small fraction of the uranium is “spent.”  This finite core cycle is also limited by accumulation of fission byproducts, particularly nuetron absorbers, inside the fuel rod.

A retired or spent nuclear fuel (“SNF”) rod is placed in a water cooling tank for an initial cool-down period during which the more highly radioactive (shorter half-life) isotopes rapidly decay. During this period, the rapid decay still generates substantial decay radiation and heat, albeit only a small fraction of the fission radiation and heat that is generated during reactor operation.  After this initial cool-down period, the slower decay of the remaining longer-half-life isotopes generates a moderate amount of decay radiation and heat, which is readily absorbed by a concrete “dry cask” during long-term storage.

A typical nuclear plant can have hundreds of active fuel rod bundles in each core, thousands of SNF rods in short-term cool-down tanks and fuel from tens of thousands of SNF rods in long-term dry cask storage. The cooling tanks at the compromised Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant collectively house around 11,000 SNF rods with a portion of those housed in the cooling tanks above reactors 1-4.

Water in the cool-down tanks acts as a neutron moderator, radiation shield and coolant, so long as the water level around the rods in the tank is maintained. If the SNF rods are left exposed and uncooled long enough, rapid oxidation (often called “burning”) and extreme heat stress can eventually compromise the cladding, expose the uranium, generate hydrogen, and release fission byproducts. Unmoderated and uncooled SNF rods can produce sufficient radiation and heat that even brief close proximity worker exposure is unacceptable. Should the cooling tank levels drop too low for too long, it could be challenging to restore the cooling tank water levels from a safe distance.

Hopefully, the cooling tank water levels at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will be restored and the situation stabilized soon.

I’ve scanned and uploaded a new document to the EfT Document Repository:

ORNL-2396: Guide to the Phase Diagrams of the Fluoride Systems (5.2M PDF)