While cleaning up the “Document Repository” I find fantastic papers written back in the hey-day of the fluoride reactor work at ORNL. This one from 1971 is really neat…an examination of the resources of the world and how they might be affected by the large-scale development of power from thorium-fueled fluoride reactors. ORNL-TM-3563: Availability of […]
A tip of the hat to Ralph Palmer, Baron Lucas of Crudwell and member of the House of Lords for mentioning thorium and this site on his blog…
I found this the other day in the 37th edition of “Steam: Its Generation and Use”, published in 1963, an industry standard reference which has been published by Babcock and Wilcox for about a century now. On page 27-4 it said: Consolidated Edison Indian Point Station In meeting the challenges and responsibilities of providing electricity […]
Alvin Weinberg was one of the pioneers of nuclear energy. He was a participant on the Manhattan Project, he holds the patent on the light-water reactor, and he was the director of Oak Ridge National Lab from 1950 to 1970. He gave his rationale for the development of a “molten-salt breeder reactor” in the opening […]
Hydrogen can be produced at high efficiency (~50%) from nuclear reactors that can produce high-temperature heat, such as the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor. Typically the hydrogen is generated from water using thermochemical processes and catalysts such as sulfur and iodine. With water as the feedstock, no CO2 or greenhouse gases are released during the hydrogen generation. […]
On a number of occasions in this weblog I have talked about the central importance of the temperature coefficient of reactivity in the safety of nuclear reactors, because the temperature coefficient governs how a reactor responds to changes, transients, accidents, etc. It must ALWAYS be negative, and strongly negative temperature coefficients are even better. While […]
Several people have pointed me to this recent piece of news: Northamerican Energy Group to Launch Thorium Power Generating Research Development Division Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of this company (Northamerican Energy Group) before. Their website seems to indicate that they are involved in oil and gas development. As far as their plans to use thorium, […]
We had another excellent meeting of our “Ohio thorium” group again at Ohio State University on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006. Early that morning, Ray Beach, Al Juhasz, and I drove from Cleveland to Columbus. Chuck Alexander and Eugenio Villeseca from Cleveland State were on the road doing the same thing. We arrived at OSU and […]
I’ve completed the conversion of WASH-1097 to a full-text PDF rather than just scanned page images. Here is the file. WASH-1097: The Use of Thorium in Nuclear Power Reactors, PDF, 1.9 MB.
Deseret News: ‘No thanks’ to uranium waste plans One of the fears about the waste from FMRI Inc. is over thorium, found naturally in the earth’s crust and contained in the waste from Oklahoma. As thorium decays, it produces the radioactive gas radon. The concern about radon is that it could cause lung cancer in […]