In January 2009, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) issued a document called “Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power,” authored by Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd. It was presented as a fact sheet. It is not accurate, and its inaccuracies matter because they have been widely cited by opponents of thorium energy development.
Dr. Alexander Cannara wrote to IEER and PSR identifying errors and omissions and requesting corrections. To the best of my knowledge, no correction was ever issued.
What follows is a complete rebuttal of the claims made in that document. The entirety of the original text is included, set in italics, with my response following each passage.
Thorium “fuel” has been proposed as an alternative to uranium fuel in nuclear reactors. There are not “thorium reactors,” but rather proposals to use thorium as a “fuel” in different types of reactors, including existing light-water reactors and various fast breeder reactor designs.
This opening statement reveals a fundamental gap in the authors’ research. From 1955 to 1974, Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducted an extensive program on fluid-fueled reactors under Dr. Alvin Weinberg, culminating in the successful operation of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). The liquid-fluoride reactor that emerged from this work was not a light-water reactor. It was not a fast-breeder reactor. It operated with a thermal (slowed-down) neutron spectrum, which made it easier to control and dramatically reduced the fissile inventory needed to start the reactor. It operated at atmospheric pressure rather than the 150 atmospheres typical of pressurized water reactors. And it was singularly well suited to thorium fuel by virtue of the chemical compatibility between fluoride salts and thorium tetrafluoride.
To claim that “there are not thorium reactors” while ignoring nearly two decades of demonstrated reactor operation at a national laboratory is not a minor oversight. It is the foundational error from which the rest of the document’s problems flow.
Thorium, which refers to thorium-232, is a radioactive metal that is about three times more abundant than uranium in the natural environment. Large known deposits are in Australia, India, and Norway. Some of the largest reserves are found in Idaho in the U.S. The primary U.S. company advocating for thorium fuel is Thorium Power (www.thoriumpower.com). Contrary to the claims made or implied by thorium proponents, however, thorium doesn’t solve the proliferation, waste, safety, or cost problems of nuclear power, and it still faces major technical hurdles for commercialization.
A factual update is warranted here: “Thorium Power” has since renamed itself Lightbridge and no longer advocates for thorium fuel. The community that continues to develop the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor concept does so precisely because thorium in fluoride form does address the proliferation, waste, safety, and cost problems of conventional nuclear power — a claim this rebuttal will substantiate point by point.
Thorium is not actually a “fuel” because it is not fissile and therefore cannot be used to start or sustain a nuclear chain reaction. A fissile material, such as uranium-235 (U-235) or plutonium-239 (which is made in reactors from uranium-238), is required to kick-start the reaction. The enriched uranium fuel or plutonium fuel also maintains the chain reaction until enough of the thorium target material has been converted into fissile uranium-233 (U-233) to take over much or most of the job. An advantage of thorium is that it absorbs slow neutrons relatively efficiently (compared to uranium-238) to produce fissile uranium-233.
The authors are correct that thorium is not fissile and requires fissile material to start the initial chain reaction — the LFTR is no different in this respect from any other reactor. But they draw entirely the wrong conclusion from this fact.
In the steady-state operation of a LFTR, thorium is the only material consumed to produce energy. That is the definition of a fuel. The reactor uses the neutrons produced by fissioning uranium-233 to convert thorium-232 into new uranium-233 at precisely the rate at which the uranium-233 is consumed. The inventory of fissile material remains stable. The only input is thorium. The only outputs are energy and fission products. This is not a subtle distinction — it is the fundamental characteristic that makes thorium so attractive as an energy source.
Conventional solid-oxide uranium fuel is covalently bonded and accumulates irreversible radiation damage during reactor operation, eventually becoming too damaged to continue. The fluoride fuel used in a LFTR is ionically bonded and is essentially impervious to radiation damage regardless of exposure duration. This physical reality has profound consequences for fuel longevity, reprocessing, and waste generation that the authors have entirely ignored.
One additional point deserves emphasis: a LFTR can be fueled at startup with uranium-235 or plutonium-239 recovered from nuclear weapons and, over time, “convert” that weapons material into uranium-233 that enables indefinite energy production from thorium. There are tens of thousands of weapons-worth of excess weapons material in the world today. The LFTR offers a path to consuming it productively, converting instruments of mass destruction into electricity. To dismiss this as irrelevant to a discussion of nuclear proliferation reflects a peculiar set of priorities.
The use of enriched uranium or plutonium in thorium fuel has proliferation implications. Although U-235 is found in nature, it is only 0.7 percent of natural uranium, so the proportion of U-235 must be industrially increased to make “enriched uranium” for use in reactors. Highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium are nuclear weapons materials.
The authors’ concern about weapons-usable materials in the nuclear fuel cycle is entirely legitimate when applied to conventional uranium reactors. But it does not apply to the LFTR in the way they imply. Since so many nuclear weapons have already been built and are now being dismantled, a technology that productively consumes those weapons materials — destroying them in the course of generating clean energy — ought to be welcomed rather than condemned.
Weapons-grade enriched uranium and plutonium cannot simply be thrown away. They must be disposed of in some fashion. The LFTR puts these materials to productive use by fissioning them, generating useful energy in the process and leaving behind fission products that are shorter-lived and less problematic than the original weapons material.
In addition, U-233 is as effective as plutonium-239 for making nuclear bombs. In most proposed thorium fuel cycles, reprocessing is required to separate out the U-233 for use in fresh fuel. This means that, like uranium fuel with reprocessing, bomb-making material is separated out, making it vulnerable to theft or diversion. Some proposed thorium fuel cycles even require 20% enriched uranium in order to get the chain reaction started in existing reactors using thorium fuel. It takes 90% enrichment to make weapons-usable uranium, but very little additional work is needed to move from 20% enrichment to 90% enrichment. Most of the separative work is needed to go from natural uranium, which has 0.7% uranium-235 to 20% U-235.
The claim that uranium-233 is “as effective as plutonium-239 for making nuclear bombs” is a gross simplification that omits the most important fact about uranium-233: it is always contaminated with uranium-232.
Uranium-232 is an unavoidable byproduct of the neutron reactions that produce uranium-233. It has a decay chain that includes bismuth-212 and thallium-208, both of which emit powerful 2.6 MeV gamma rays. These gamma rays begin to build up within days of any attempt to purify the uranium-233, and within a few months the radiation field from even a small quantity becomes intense enough to destroy the electronics in a nuclear weapon, degrade the precisely engineered chemical explosives, and broadcast the location of the material to any radiation detection system in the vicinity.
This is not a theoretical concern. This is precisely why, after examining uranium-233 as a potential weapons material during and after the Manhattan Project, the United States concluded it was impractical and abandoned the effort. Glenn Seaborg, who discovered both plutonium and uranium-233, personally argued against pursuing U-233 weapons after examining the production pathways. No nation has ever deployed an operational nuclear weapon using uranium-233 as the fissile material. The world’s nuclear arsenals are built on enriched uranium and plutonium — not because no one thought of uranium-233, but because it was tried and found wanting as a weapons material.
As for the processing and transfer of uranium-233 in a LFTR: in a properly designed reactor, the fuel processing equipment is located within the reactor containment, under intense radiation fields and at the elevated temperatures required to keep the salt liquid. The uranium-233 bred in the outer blanket region is directed to the inner core region through a fixed electrochemical process. Redirecting that flow would require physically rebuilding the reactor — a task utterly beyond the capability of any plausible adversary operating covertly. The uranium-233 never needs to leave the secure containment area, never needs to be handled by humans, and never exists in a form that could be directly used in a weapon without extensive processing in facilities that would be immediately detectable.
This is another critical point the authors have missed entirely by failing to engage with the fluid-fueled reactor concept.
It has been claimed that thorium fuel cycles with reprocessing would be much less of a proliferation risk because the thorium can be mixed with uranium-238. In this case, fissile uranium-233 is also mixed with non-fissile uranium-238. The claim is that if the uranium-238 content is high enough, the mixture cannot be used to make bombs without a complex uranium enrichment plant. This is misleading. More uranium-238 does dilute the uranium-233, but it also results in the production of more plutonium-239 as the reactor operates. So the proliferation problem remains either bomb-usable uranium-233 or bomb-usable plutonium is created and can be separated out by reprocessing.
Deliberately mixing uranium-238 with uranium-233 in a LFTR is in fact a bad idea, and for reasons the authors have not considered. Adding uranium-238 to the core salt would cause those neutrons that should be converting thorium into uranium-233 to instead convert uranium-238 into plutonium-239, degrading the very fuel cycle that makes thorium valuable. Plutonium trifluoride has limited solubility in fluoride salt, and plutonium-239 performs poorly in a thermal neutron spectrum, fissioning only about two-thirds of the time it absorbs a neutron. The introduction of uranium-238 into the core would compromise the reactor’s ability to sustain itself on thorium alone and would require the continuous addition of fissile material — the opposite of what a LFTR is designed to achieve.
However, the fluid nature of LFTR fuel makes possible something that has no analog in solid-fueled reactors: just-in-time irreversible downblending. Under scenarios where it became necessary to permanently disable a reactor and render its fissile inventory inaccessible, uranium-238 could be introduced into the core salt within the containment building, irreversibly mixing with the uranium-233 and creating a mixture that cannot be isotopically separated — particularly given the severe gamma radiation that uranium-232 contamination would produce during any separation attempt. The reactor would be permanently disabled and its fissile material permanently rendered unusable. This option exists only with fluid fuel and represents a significant non-proliferation advantage that the authors have not considered.
Further, while an enrichment plant is needed to separate U-233 from U-238, it would take less separative work to do so than enriching natural uranium. This is because U-233 is five atomic weight units lighter than U-238, compared to only three for U-235. It is true that such enrichment would not be a straightforward matter because the U-233 is contaminated with U-232, which is highly radioactive and has very radioactive radionuclides in its decay chain. The radiation-dose-related problems associated with separating U-233 from U-238 and then handling the U-233 would be considerable and more complex than enriching natural uranium for the purpose of bomb making. But in principle, the separation can be done, especially if worker safety is not a primary concern; the resulting U-233 can be used to make bombs. There is just no way to avoid proliferation problems associated with thorium fuel cycles that involve reprocessing. Thorium fuel cycles without reprocessing would offer the same temptation to reprocess as today’s once-through uranium fuel cycles.
The authors have revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of uranium isotope separation with this passage.
Any uranium isotope separation facility — gaseous diffusion, gas centrifuge, or laser enrichment — operates under exquisitely controlled conditions. The introduction of uranium-232-contaminated feed material into such a plant would not merely create radiation hazards for workers. It would permanently contaminate every surface of the separation equipment with the decay daughters of uranium-232, rendering the facility inoperable for any future use. No state or non-state actor that had invested the enormous resources required to build a uranium enrichment plant would risk its permanent destruction by introducing uranium-232-contaminated feed.
The “suicide operators” scenario the authors implicitly invoke is not a realistic proliferation pathway. It is an unfalsifiable hypothetical that, if applied consistently, would condemn every energy technology ever devised. The relevant comparison is not between thorium and perfection, but between thorium and the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle that the authors apparently prefer — a cycle that produces tens of tonnes of separated plutonium annually around the world, in a chemical form that is highly suitable for weapons, using production pathways that are thoroughly understood by every nuclear weapons state.
Proponents claim that thorium fuel significantly reduces the volume, weight and long-term radiotoxicity of spent fuel. Using thorium in a nuclear reactor creates radioactive waste that proponents claim would only have to be isolated from the environment for 500 years, as opposed to the irradiated uranium-only fuel that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. This claim is wrong. The fission of thorium creates long-lived fission products like technetium-99 (half-life over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository.
The authors make a sweeping claim about “thorium” while confining their actual analysis to solid thorium fuel in a conventional reactor — again failing to engage with the liquid-fluoride approach they have not acknowledged.
In a LFTR, thorium is consumed with exceptional efficiency approaching completeness. Unburned thorium and unused uranium-233 at the end of a reactor’s operational life are simply transferred to the next generation of reactor, never entering a waste stream. The fuel is not damaged by radiation and does not degrade. The comparison to conventional spent nuclear fuel — which represents an enormous volume of material containing large quantities of usable but inaccessible fuel — is not valid.
Now, a word about technetium-99: the authors raise it as if its 200,000-year half-life were self-evidently alarming. A basic principle of radioactive decay has been overlooked here. Half-life and radioactivity are inversely related. A material with a 200,000-year half-life is decaying so slowly that it is barely radioactive at all. Technetium-99’s immediate precursor, technetium-99m, has a half-life of six hours — making it approximately 150 million times more radioactive than Tc-99.
This fact will surprise readers who know that technetium-99m is used in tens of millions of diagnostic medical imaging procedures every year. Patients intentionally ingest Tc-99m, relying on its gamma emissions to image internal organs and diagnose cancers, heart disease, and bone disorders. After the procedure, the Tc-99m decays over a period of days to Tc-99, which is excreted in urine and enters the municipal water supply. If the medical and radiological communities see no concern in intentionally introducing into human bodies a form of technetium that is 150 million times more radioactive than Tc-99, and then releasing Tc-99 into our water systems, the authors’ invocation of technetium as a uniquely alarming byproduct of thorium fission requires considerably more justification than they have provided.
If the spent fuel is not reprocessed, thorium-232 is very-long lived (half-life: 14 billion years) and its decay products will build up over time in the spent fuel. This will make the spent fuel quite radiotoxic, in addition to all the fission products in it. It should also be noted that inhalation of a unit of radioactivity of thorium-232 or thorium-228 (which is also present as a decay product of thorium-232) produces a far higher dose, especially to certain organs, than the inhalation of uranium containing the same amount of radioactivity. For instance, the bone surface dose from breathing an amount (mass) of insoluble thorium is about 200 times that of breathing the same mass of uranium.
Thorium-232’s half-life of 14 billion years — approximately the age of the universe — means that its radioactivity is extraordinarily low. A long half-life is not a danger; it is the mathematical expression of an extremely slow rate of decay. A material that takes 14 billion years to lose half its radioactivity is barely radioactive at all. The concern about thorium’s decay chain building up over time in spent fuel is legitimate for solid-fueled reactors where thorium would be stranded in the waste, but as previously noted, a LFTR does not reject thorium to a waste stream — it recycles it until it is consumed.
The bone surface dose comparison between inhaled insoluble thorium and inhaled uranium strikes me as remarkable for a different reason than the authors intend. The Earth’s continental crust contains approximately five billion kilograms of thorium per meter of depth across its entire surface area. This thorium has been present since the formation of the planet. Its decay chain has been building up in soil, rock, and groundwater for four billion years. Human beings have been breathing and ingesting trace quantities of thorium and its decay products since our species first appeared. To raise this as a novel hazard introduced by the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel — when its concentration in any reactor waste stream would be negligible compared to its natural abundance in the crust — suggests the authors are engaged in rhetorical rather than scientific analysis.
Furthermore, a LFTR does not produce “spent thorium fuel” in any conventional sense. Thorium remains in the reactor until consumed. At reactor shutdown, remaining thorium is transferred to the next reactor generation.
Finally, the use of thorium also creates waste at the front end of the fuel cycle. The radioactivity associated with these is expected to be considerably less than that associated with a comparable amount of uranium milling. However, mine wastes will pose long-term hazards, as in the case of uranium mining. There are also often hazardous non-radioactive metals in both thorium and uranium mill tailings.
Thorium is not primarily mined for its own sake. It occurs alongside rare earth elements in monazite deposits, and as global demand for rare earths continues to grow — driven by electric vehicles, wind turbines, consumer electronics, and defense systems — thorium will be extracted as a byproduct of that mining whether we use it as a fuel or not. The relevant policy question is not whether thorium mining will occur, but whether the thorium it yields will be used productively or treated as radioactive waste and disposed of at public expense.
The United States currently holds stockpiled thorium and treats naturally occurring thorium as a regulatory burden. China, with characteristic strategic patience, stockpiles thorium from its rare earth mining operations against the day when it operates thorium reactors. The authors’ front-end waste concern applies equally — and in fact far more severely — to the uranium fuel cycle they apparently prefer. Uranium mining, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and waste disposal represent a far larger, more complex, and more hazardous front-end burden than thorium mining would under any thorium fuel scenario.
Research and development of thorium fuel has been undertaken in Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the UK and the U.S. for more than half a century. Besides remote fuel fabrication and issues at the front end of the fuel cycle, thorium-U-233 breeder reactors produce fuel (“breed”) much more slowly than uranium-plutonium-239 breeders. This leads to technical complications. India is sometimes cited as the country that has successfully developed thorium fuel. In fact, India has been trying to develop a thorium breeder fuel cycle for decades but has not yet done so commercially.
The “slow breeding” point is technically accurate but contextually misleading. A LFTR bred to sustain itself on thorium — producing U-233 at the same rate it is consumed — does exactly what it needs to do. The question of breeding ratio is significant only if one’s goal is to produce surplus fissile material for other reactors, not simply to sustain a given reactor indefinitely on a thorium feed. The authors seem to consider excess plutonium production a virtue, which is a peculiar position for organizations that have spent decades warning about plutonium proliferation risks.
India’s thorium program has indeed struggled commercially, but for a specific reason: it has focused on solid thorium oxide fuel in conventional reactor geometries. This approach inherits all the disadvantages of solid fuel — radiation damage, limited burnup, complex reprocessing — while adding the complications of thorium’s chemistry in oxide form. The difficulties India has encountered are not inherent to thorium. They are inherent to the choice of fuel form. The liquid-fluoride approach transcends these difficulties entirely, which is once again a point the authors have not engaged with.
One reason reprocessing thorium fuel cycles haven’t been successful is that uranium-232 (U-232) is created along with uranium-233. U-232, which has a half-life of about 70 years, is extremely radioactive and is therefore very dangerous in small quantities: a single small particle in a lung would exceed legal radiation standards for the general public. U-232 also has highly radioactive decay products. Therefore, fabricating fuel with U-233 is very expensive and difficult.
The authors have identified a genuine challenge for solid thorium fuel systems — and then applied it uniformly to all thorium reactors, ignoring the one reactor design for which it is not a challenge.
U-232 contamination makes the remote fabrication of solid uranium-233-oxide fuel pellets extremely difficult and expensive. This is true. In the liquid-fluoride reactor, there is no fuel fabrication. The uranium-233 bred in the blanket salt is chemically extracted and redirected into the core salt by an electrochemical process that takes place entirely within the radiation-shielded containment building. No pellets are made. No fuel assemblies are assembled. No human hands touch the material. The difficulty the authors correctly identify for solid fuel cycles simply does not arise in the liquid-fluoride system.
The presence of U-232, far from being an obstacle in the LFTR, is one of its most important non-proliferation features — as I described above.
Thorium may be abundant and possess certain technical advantages, but it does not mean that it is economical. Compared to uranium, thorium fuel cycle is likely to be even more costly. In a once-through mode, it will need both uranium enrichment (or plutonium separation) and thorium target rod production. In a breeder configuration, it will need reprocessing, which is costly. In addition, as noted, inhalation of thorium-232 produces a higher dose than the same amount of uranium-238 (either by radioactivity or by weight). Reprocessed thorium creates even more risks due to the highly radioactive U-232 created in the reactor. This makes worker protection more difficult and expensive for a given level of annual dose.
This passage is the economic argument against thorium. It would be more persuasive if it engaged with the economics of the liquid-fluoride approach rather than the solid-fuel approach the authors have analyzed throughout.
The LFTR has an exceptionally compact and self-contained fuel cycle. Thorium tetrafluoride requires only a simple one-step conversion from thorium dioxide — a chemically favorable reaction — before it is ready for use. It does not require enrichment, because thorium is monoisotopic. It does not require pellet fabrication. It does not require zirconium cladding. It does not require the elaborate quality control procedures associated with solid fuel elements. At the back end, the liquid fuel is continuously cleaned within the reactor itself; there is no need to ship spent fuel to a separate reprocessing facility.
The analogy that comes to mind is this: to evaluate the economics of diesel fuel, one should use a diesel engine. Makhijani and Boyd have effectively evaluated diesel fuel by putting it in a gasoline engine, confirming that it does not work well, and then concluding that diesel is uneconomical. Their analysis tells us about solid thorium fuel in light-water reactors. It tells us nothing meaningful about the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor.
Conclusion
Makhijani and Boyd have written a document that, in every section, evaluates thorium as if the liquid-fluoride reactor does not exist. Their proliferation arguments ignore the self-protecting nature of U-232 contamination and the closed, contained fuel processing of the LFTR. Their waste arguments ignore the high fuel utilization and fuel recycling that liquid-fluoride operation makes possible. Their safety arguments ignore the low-pressure operation and passive freeze-plug safety of the LFTR. Their cost arguments ignore the simplicity of the fluoride fuel cycle compared to the elaborate infrastructure of uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, and spent fuel management.
On proliferation: no operational nuclear weapon has ever been built from uranium-233, for well-understood physical reasons that predate this document by decades.
On waste: the LFTR does not generate spent nuclear fuel in the conventional sense. It consumes its fuel until it is gone.
On safety: a reactor operating at atmospheric pressure with a fuel that is chemically stable, non-combustible, and designed to drain passively to a subcritical geometry on loss of power offers fundamentally different safety characteristics from a high-pressure water-cooled reactor.
On cost: the liquid-fluoride fuel cycle, properly understood, eliminates the most expensive elements of the conventional uranium fuel cycle while adding no comparable costs of its own.
Makhijani and Boyd should retract this document. It has misled the public and policymakers about a technology that deserves serious and accurate evaluation. The world’s energy and proliferation challenges are too consequential for our public discourse to rest on a foundation of errors.
Thankyou very much.
The whole LFTR subject I've just discovered is timely in light of Fukushima. This IEER/PSR expose' (of them) tells me there is something to fear more than nuclear contamination–political opposition.
It seems to me that something with the potential of LFTR would be hugely threatening to a whole entrenched energy industry (all forms, conventional AND "renewable"). Call me an conspiracy theorist, but I would expect those interests to be doing whatever they can to discredit and impede any further development of LFTR. Covertly.
It sounds to me like LFTR could profitably be developed by private concerns without government money, loans or interference. …maybe use of government "waste" materials would be helpful.
The issue is interference. What better way to impede development than to regulate it to oblivion? So just sic your lobbyists on capitol hill and problem solved.
So the most important aspect of this initiative is probably getting the political will to enable it. Getting the venture capital, etc. should be relatively easy.
Footnote: You will find that I strongly oppose any appeal to government to fund development…we are already broke, and you don't want the strings attached.
Discussion?
Duane, I think your analysis of the source of interference is misplaced. It would be much easier for entrenched energy concerns to interfere with private development of the LFTR because they could easily affect the funding sources (and LFTR's proponents don't have the pocket change required to develop the technology lying around.) Instead, making it a government program would build on the history of successful technology leaps that the government has been able to implement as crash programs. The key would be to marshal public support, probably easier than overcoming behind-the-scenes interference with private funding.
Your assertion that "we are already broke" is an ill-thought-out departure into politics. The reason anyone can claim that we're broke is because we've been cutting taxes to satisfy the wealthy for the last 30 years. Would you claim that your household was "broke" if you intentionally quit earning money? I doubt it. Clinton showed that by simply raising taxes on the highest income levels to post-Reagan levels, the government would run a surplus. Tying LFTR to dysfunctional fiscal and tax policies in a cause-and-effect relationship simply justifies the interference you are concerned about.
With opponents like Mr. Makhijani and Ms. Boyd one really wonder why a LFTR is not already built. Is this really the best the establishment can offer?
I have been looking at the videos for a couple of weeks now, and this question just begs to be answered: With so many possible benefits and a clear path to direct the development, WHY haven't it already begun?
All we need is one excentric billionaire!
I realize this is off topic but seer doesn't know what he is talking about. Our government is broke and the idea that our deficit, debt and unfunded liabilities can be covered by taxing the rich is ignorant and immoral. Even if you raised the top rate to 100% you would not generate enough revenue to sustain our government spending, you would only delay our insolvancy. The rich already pay more than their share, the top 10% of earners pay supply almost half of our revenue and the bottom 45% of earners pay nothing or less than nothing when you factor in the earned income credit and making work pay program. The money of the rich belongs to them, you can't justify stealing it and then wasting the money on handouts from misguided, fraud-infested government entitlements. The government which governs least, governs best.
Given the existence of a very large,reliable, and efficient grid , the obstacles to creating thorium reactors would pale in comparison with tying together various widely spaced renewable sources.
Gradually replacing the present coal fired,gas fired,and uranium based power plants with Thorium based reactors an would cut the cost of per kilowatt hour,and field test the varieties of materials needed for the transition.
Why would the uranium based reactor makers fear thorium?Why would the public fear thorium?
Kirk, you need to provide some more detail in regard to the statement “no operational nuclear weapon has ever been fabricated from thorium or uranium-233”, specifically regarding the MET shot of Operation Teapot.
I guess the key word is “operational”, but that won’t stop the antis from seizing upon it. If you have any technical details about the uniqueness of this test, especially how they dealt with the U232 problem, I would like to hear about it. And it is probably an arrow you need to have already sharpened.
@boardtwotiers: Your drivel exemplifies the utter ignorance of the basic aspects of governmental budgets and funding that, unfortunately, is too familiar in the public discourse these days.
If an energy solution that relies almost solely on domestic sources and greatly decreases total energy costs to our nation, resulting in energy self-reliance and allowing domestic wealth to be channeled to, say, ELIMINATING gov't debt and deficit in short order could be realized through a single shot of R&D funded by short-term, initial gov't deficit spending, then why wouldn't that be highly desirable?
For those like yourself that are prone to comparing gov't budgets to household finance (wrongly, but that's another discussion), consider this. If what is essentially deficit spending for a college education is so undesirable as to be avoided, then I suppose literally no one would consider doing so, despite the fact that, in most cases, the long-term personal wealth enjoyed from garnering that education far exceeds the amount of debt accumulated.
Basically, the IEER's fact sheet boils down to this argument. "Screws are poor replacements for nails, as every one who's ever tried to hammer one into wood has noted its lower efficiency in entering wood." If confronted with the existence of the screwdriver, I would fully expect them to argue its uselessness compared to hammers in the hammering of nails.
About bringing the government into it. I am a retired US government employee. The majority of my colleagues were honest, mildly idealistic folk who believed that their duty was to the tax-paying public, their real employers.
I applied for employment in the hope that my own honest work would not be subject to the vagaries and the incompetence of so-called private enterprise.
The most successful solar powered energy projects in the USA are the hydroelectric dams of the Bonneville Power Authority.
The only successful major non-fossil-fuel transportation system is the nuclear powered capital ships fleet of the US Navy.
The only country in the world that gets most of its electricity from nuclear power is France, which was bullied by the EU into "privatizing" its government-owned EDF. The EU power companies couldn't compete with the prices EDF could charge. Fortunately, I think they still cannot.
I was once an employee of that excellent corporation, IBM. I can assure all readers that the degree of bureaucracy in that private corporation was exactly comparable with that in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
But in the latter, we had responsibility for regulating some of the activities of companies like the now notorious Enron, a private entity run by people incompetent enough to go bankrupt in the energy business.
Real scientific basic research is not well adapted to the secrecy necessary for proprietary success, and how shall we expect oil and coal companies to show any enthusiasm for putting their main business out of business?
Heavy water reactors can also use thorium to eliminate plutonium from used "waste" light water fuel rods. There is enough of this "waste" plutonium to start all of the heavy water reactors needed to supply all of the electrical energy of the world. This would eliminate all plutonium that would be needed to be stored other wise. All future fuel would be thorium and the U233 made from it. Enough excess U233 could be made to start other reactors over a period of years with increased neutron efficiencies.
Fast neutron reactors can fission some thorium directly as proposed by Carlo Rubbia for his accelerator driven system. ..HG..
EDF should use AECL designs to build a few heavy water reactors to eliminate the plutonium from used MOX fuels and to save money. ..HG..
I had no idea there was an alternative fissionable fuel source that produces it's own "ember". Keep on with this people!
Could you explain the materials necessary for building the reactor core? The temperature and radiation flux require some exceptional materials to survive for many years of operation. This is the one question I have not yet seen specific information about. I am indeed just beginning my studies of this energy source. It seems very exciting, and I hope this issue has been addressed.
The current government direction of cutting energy use is the wrong direction. Our economic health depends on economical energy and lots of it. We can't keep growing fossil fuel use; solar, wind and other "green" sources are only marginal players; old style nuclear plants are dangerous and have many other issues. LFTR appears to be the direction for long lasting economical energy, free of pollution and far less contamination than any alternatives. I would like to know what costs would be for building a modern LFTR then replicating at every old coal site in the US. We would need to streamline and modernize the regulation process to make any real headway.
@Stan, only one problem with an otherwise reasonable suggestion. Coal plants can follow grid load as it varies but as far as I can see, nuclear is steady and not able to satisfy peaks in demand. In other words, coal power is dispatchable, nuclear power is not. The only renewable source of power that is dispatchable is hydro-electricity, so of course dams are being removed from wherever it is possible. This is the perverse expression of human nature, as in fearing nuclear energy when no one has died from its use in America while being quite happy to get into a car oblivious of the high risk of motor vehicle fatalities.
I have just been educating myself about Thorium and its LFTR possibilities. In this day of waning fuel supplies and desire for centralized renewable power it amazes me that people are so ignorant. I see the issues of developing a new nuclear fuel cycle, but the benefits far out weigh the obstacles if you care about building a new power infrastructure. We need names of congress that are for Thorium research and those opposed. We need to get an organized contact group. We need to get wealthy people willing to do ground level investment. Historically the path to making this happen is there to be read. The problem is following it to change the thinking of those in power.
Being a new grandfather I resonated with http://on.ted.com/Hansen and joined 350.org. But while Hansen and 350.org are effectively sounding the alarm they seem to offer no clear and powerful solutions. Then http://on.ted.com/o3FE renewed my belief in nuclear energy while solving its historic problems (my 1st engineering job was helping to build a nuclear power plant in Upstate NY). A marriage of the two movements may be effective. A worldwide grassroots movement to raise the alarm of fossil fuel burning AND offer a solution in the form of the LFTR. Since the fossil fuel industry has most politicians in their pocket, let's sidestep politicians and governments and crowd source the development of some LFTRs; get a bunch of common folks and super rich to pledge the money to develop multiple LFTRs on some privately owned islands, or ships in international waters, outside of any government jurisdiction and interference.
The ocean has much uranium in it, and it is already also contaminated with radio active potassium from the creation of the earth. All life forms have always been radioactive which fact is seldom thoroughly mentioned by either the anti nuclear power advocates or the nuclear power promoters. Life knows how to survive gamma rays and to repair the damage caused by the internal and external radioactive rays most of the time. Too much iron will kill you; too much plutonium will kill you. Swallow a gram of iron acetate today and you may be dead tomorrow. Swallow a gram of plutonium 239 oxide today and you will likely live for years as most of it will pass right through and most the rest can be eliminated with treatments. The oceans have every fission product in them already from the natural fission of Uranium on the land and in the sea. Most of the radioactive fission products in natural uranium is removed when the uranium 235 is concentrated for nuclear reactors. The remaining uranium is called depleted uranium because it has a lower concentration of uranium 235. People are being lied to that this is a dangerous nuclear waste because the fission products begin to build up again but never can reach the concentration or the radioactivity of ordinary uranium that they likely spread on their gardens with the phosphates and naturally radioactive potassium.
I am not an engineer, but my father was. He taught me to appreciate the beauty and elegance of simplicity and efficiency. It seems to me that the LFTR has a great deal to offer in coming to terms with a number of pressing energy, financial, political and environmental issues. But simply building a better mousetrap will not necessarily bring the world rushing to your door. Guardians of the status-quo will marshall their considerable resources to obstruct any effort to reduce their fortunes. Environmentalists schooled to mistrust technological panaceas will not be easily debated, much less converted. But there must be an effort to move this technology into the public debate, and that is clearly the role of aggressive public relations. In all of these discussions I have seen almost no reference to this crucial tool. It doesn't take a great deal of observational acumen to notice the enormity of funding going into advertising in the current election cycle. The average citizen is overwhelmed with competing versions of basic discussions (witness the climate change "debate"). But these kinds of efforts can be extremely expensive, and unfortunately the obstructionists tend to have the superior funding (again the climate "debate"). Perhaps the most efficient strategy would be to garner support for this technology from those groups enjoying the most success in related areas; specifically environmentalists. I realize this would be a challenge given their simplistic support of "renewable" technologies. But imagine the power and reach of a united environmental/LFTR public relations effort. Without such a high profile presence in the public discourse, I'm afraid this promising technology will remain a wonky niche, a weak sister 4th party candidate that never even gets invited to the debates.