Robert Cywinski
Professor, Special Research Advisor at University of Huddersfield
Posted on 05/25/2013 6:45:24 PM PDT by neverdem
The only source of energy that can meet global demand while avoiding greenhouse gas emissions is nuclear power. But our perception of nuclear power is coloured by issues of safety, radiotoxic waste, and the threat of nuclear proliferation.
Yet there is a safer alternative to current nuclear technology…
Robert Cywinski receives funding from the EPSRC and STFC
The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, Canberra, CDU, Deakin, Flinders, Griffith, JCU, La Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle. QUT, Swinburne, UniSA, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS and VU.
The only source of energy that can meet global demand while avoiding greenhouse gas emissions is nuclear power. But our perception of nuclear power is coloured by issues of safety, radiotoxic waste, and the threat of nuclear proliferation.
Yet there is a safer alternative to current nuclear technology: new reactor designs inherently safer than conventional reactors, that produce little waste, and are proliferation resistant. The new designs allow us to reuse our legacy of radiotoxic waste as fuel.
The secret is a shiny, silver-coloured element called thorium, and it’s not new. Thorium has long been regarded as a potential nuclear fuel. Unconventional prototypes such as the Oak Ridge thorium molten salt reactor (MSR) in the US were demonstrated in the 1960s. Since then the US, Germany and Britain have all used thorium fuel to produce electricity in conventional reactors. The technology is proven.
Thorium is four times more plentiful than uranium, about as common as lead. A mere 5,000 tons of thorium could meet the entire planet’s energy needs for a year. Known deposits alone would provide enough energy for 10,000 years. Unlike conventional uranium fuel, thorium is burnt, leaving much less radiotoxic waste and almost no plutonium. It is often claimed that thorium’s inability to generate plutonium for weapons was the reason it was abandoned during the Cold War.
There is considerable support for thorium as a nuclear fuel. With uranium or plutonium additives it could be used in current nuclear reactors with only minor modifications. And it brings the opportunity to exploit the latest innovations in reactor design. A molten salt reactor, for example, is meltdown-proof because the fluoride-based fuel is already molten. Theoretically self-regulating, the design might suit small modular units for remote communities, generating electricity or heat.
Another approach is the accelerator-driven subcritical reactor (ADSR). In this still theoretical design, high energy protons are fired at atoms of heavy metals such as lead, chipping off individual neutrons. The thorium fuel absorbs these free, high-energy neutrons and is converted into uranium. This uranium in turn absorbs more neutrons and splits (“fissions”), releasing energy.
The ADSR is extremely safe as the thorium-uranium process is “subcritical”. That is, if the accelerator is switched off the reactor is fail-safe, unable to sustain a chain reaction. Furthermore, the high-energy neutrons it generates can break down the toxic radioactive waste from conventional reactors, turning our stockpiles of nuclear waste into more fuel.
India, with its substantial deposits of thorium, is now pursuing thorium-based nuclear technology using a thorium-plutonium mix. In Japan, research is underway to resurrect the thorium molten salt concept. Norway is considering the potential for its very substantial thorium reserves to provide energy for the years after North Sea gas and oil. China, which produces great quantities of thorium as a toxic by-product of mining rare earths, is investing heavily in molten salt reactors and ADSRs.
And in the UK? Unfortunately there is no coherent government, industry or academic stance. Yet the UK is rich in engineering and materials expertise, reactor and accelerator design.
Even a modest investment in an advanced thorium research and development programme could provide the UK with a unique opportunity to build and sustain a multi-billion pound nuclear industry based upon safe, inexhaustible, low waste and proliferation-resistant nuclear power generation. As well as providing national energy security, it would deliver the means for the UK to compete in existing nuclear markets, and open new international markets that are closed to uranium and plutonium-based reactors.
Academics, businesspeople and social reformers alike are working towards a consensus on a thorium-fuelled nuclear future. But with no government support or leadership, and a nuclear industry wedded to existing uranium-based designs it’s likely the UK will miss yet another golden, or in this case silver, opportunity.
Thorium reactors would be the perfect solution, which is why they will not be permitted.
‘The only source of energy that can meet global demand while avoiding greenhouse gas emissions is nuclear power’
This is misleading in so many ways. The largest greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is WATER VAPOR. It is impossible to produce large scale electricity without producing water vapor except in a damn. They keep tearing down the damns. All large scale power plants that are not damns are steam powered. Some use coal, some oil and some gas, but they all produce STEAM to run the dynamos.
This is the flaw. Carbon Dioxide is essential for life. No CO2, no plants. No plants, no oxygen. No oxygen, no humans.
More CO2, more plants, more life.
CO2 is not a poison, it is the essence of life.
I wouldn't want to live downwind form one of those power plants.
I understand your point, but it shows a drastic misunderstanding of how water vapor works in the atmosphere.
H2O is naturally present in up to 1 to 3 parts per hundred, not low parts per million, as with all the other greenhouse gases. Uniquely, it constantly goes in and out of the atmosphere by the processes of evaporation and condensation.
IOW, while man can affect the humidity somewhat in the locally by things such as irrigation systems, he is utterly incapable of affecting the amount of water vapor air on a global basis.
The teensy amounts produced by industrial processes are quite literally not measurable on a global scale relative to those produced by natural evaporation. 3/4 of the earth’s surface, after all, is water. When heated by the sun, it evaporates at an enormous rate.
These things can be quantified, if you like, but I hope you can just agree that man is not going to change the hydrologic cycle in any significant way. Just can’t do it. The only reason we can affect the amount of carbon, if indeed we are, is because there wasn’t much there to begin with.
The future of nuclear energy is LENR.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/coldfusion/index?tab=articles
Keywords: ColdFusion; LENR; lanr; CMNS ; ecat
The dose is the poison. CO2 is indeed a deadly toxin, as crews of a number of submarines have discovered. People living near volcanoes have also been killed.
Concentrations of 7% to 10% (70,000 to 100,000 ppm) will kill within minutes or hours. Course that''s a WHOLE lot less than the <400 ppm in the atmosphere now.
What energy crisis? Global warming is a hoax and we have an ample supply of carbon based fuels.
‘The only source of energy that can meet global demand while avoiding greenhouse gas emissions is nuclear power’
Why are you getting wrapped around the axle because of feel good BS?
There’s loads of thorium, and if that ADSR pans out, we can mix it with all the toxic, radioactive waste we already generated for more energy.
Right. Di-hydrogen monoxide is lethal as well.
Try to live without it.
Quite true.
As is oxygen, FTM.
I’m all for it, along with Cold Fusion and the XL Pipeline..
Dude, you clearly are not properly aligned with the low flush toilets.
The author is from the University of Huddersfield, UK. They do.
The University of Huddersfield in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, can trace its roots back to a Science and Mechanic Institute founded in 1825. It has two external campuses in Oldham, Greater Manchester, and Barnsley, South Yorkshire. A founding member of the Northern Consortium and member of Yorkshire Universities, it is among the top 10 greenest universities in Britain.
The same could be said about CO2. The teensy amount we produce pales in comparison to the amount produced by the oceans alone. Any excess produced by burning so called fossil fuels could be mitigated by the planting of trees.
I like the idea of Nuclear, or as GWB calls it Nucular, power. I just hate the thought that his very first statement is demonstrably incorrect.
But water is quite literally (and not in the Joe Biden sense) the most abundant material on Earth. And it is also remarkably easy to purify. Happens naturally all the time and even easy to duplicate synthetically.
I like nuclear energy. Using thorium would be great and I am all for it. t is that feel good BS is the reason why we will never utilize the energy.
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