Posted on 07/27/2013 2:59:13 PM PDT by ckilmer
Bill Gates Is Beginning to Dream the Thorium Dream
By Brian Merchant Image: Wikimedia
Mention thorium—an alternative fuel for nuclear power—to the right crowd, and faces will alight with the same look of spirited devotion you might see in, say, Twin Peaks and Chicago Cubs fans. People love thorium against the odds. And now Bill Gates has given them a new reason to keep rooting for the underdog element.
TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But the concern just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too.
“We’re thinking about it and trying to work on it and we have a few proprietary ideas that we’re cooking up,” John Gilleland, TerraPower's CEO, said in an interview with the Weinberg Foundation. “We like to work on an idea for a while before we run out and tell about it – so we have some ideas which we’re trying to ferret out how good they are.”
He wouldn't say more, but Gilleland was talking about molten salt reactors, which are considered by many to be safer than the conventional pressurized water reactors currently operating in the United States—especially when they run on thorium. Gilleland said that their "big bet" remains on the traveling wave technology, but that thorium was definitely receiving some renewed attention.
The American thorium dream—which the United States government pursued in tandem with the uranium-fueled reactors we're familiar with now throughout the 60s—was more or less entirely burst in 1973. This despite the successful testing of a thorium-fueled facility, built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and some evidence suggesting that thorium was a safer, more abundant fuel. Research was halted, and uranium-fueled reactors emerged as the standard.
Yet estimates place the amount of accessible thorium at around four times as much as uranium, and it's less radioactive, too. Furthermore, thorium advocates point to the molten salt reactors that harness it—they use, as nuclear expert Mark Halper notes, "use liquid fuel that cannot melt down and that harmlessly drains into a holding tank in the event of an emergency."
For the above reasons, the alternate nuke juice is again drawing interest in the energy world as the search for reliable carbon-free power sources intensifies. China is currently studying thorium power, using US-pioneered research as a jumping off point. India is about to start building its own thorium nuke plant. And Norway just recently announced that it's doing intensive testing at its new thorium facility this summer. Investors as diverse as Toshiba, Thor Energy, and South Africa's Steenkampskraal Thorium Ltd are financing the project. Now Bill Gates, and his bottomless coffers, will begin funding the thorium dream, too.
Gates has been interested in energy innovation for years now; in a widely-shared TED talk, he spoke about his traveling wave reactors, and the lack of experimentation in energy tech. He's previously funded research into molten salt reactors, but this is the first time his team has explicitly stated that they're getting into thorium.
Last year, TerraPower hired a man named Jeff Lakowski to be its new Director of Innovation, and he started showing up at national thorium conferences (which are typically small but spirited affairs). Now he's made clear that Gates' team is seriously pursuing the tech. It's not clear if any patents have been filed, or what innovations TerraPower is pursuing. Gilleland did say that they're not harkening back to the Oak Ridge model, as most ongoing thorium projects do—he said their plans have "considerable departures" from the old thorium standard.
What those departures may be remain to be seen—and in the meantime, they'll no doubt have the small legion of fervent thorium fans dreaming of a cleaner, safer nuclear technology with resurgent vigor.
whoops that above link is the wrong link to the utube of the thorim dream.this is it. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/motherboard-tv-the-thorium-dream
Interesting stuff
I wonder if his support of things like this is the real reason the hard left hates the otherwise rather leftist Gates so much?
The environmental movement often appears to me to interested not so much in the environment as it is nature worship. Any form of energy that allows people to not live in mud huts is frowned on
All the advantages for thorium-powered nuclear reactors still apply, but apparently there is a large constituency for the prevention of widespread adoption of a cheap, reliable and safe source of energy for the population at large.
Uranium-powered nuclear reactors have received the lion’s share of funding into research to make them more reliable, at the expense of funding thorium-based reactors, for what apparently is one overriding reason - it is impossible to weaponize the spent fuel from a thorium reactor into a thermonuclear bomb of some kind. It is my firm belief that the “spent” uranium rods, by-product of uranium power plants, which still contain some 97% of the potential extractable energy when removed from service, are retained for only one purpose - the production of fission and fusion thermonuclear weapons, or at least the threat to carry out such a program.
The presence of such a threat sure keeps the SANE crowd pumped up, but then, they actually have another agenda - maintaining an artificial scarcity of potential means to spread prosperity to parts of the world that do not now enjoy the benefits. With prosperity comes independence and freedom, through competition and assignment of benefits based upon individual initiative - rewarding merit.
And the possibility of that just sends some folks into fits of paranoia and jealousy.
If Gates supports it it probably reduces fertility somehow. That seems to be his and Melinda’s whole MO in the past 15 years.
Fixed
Despite their talking points, our socialists are less interested in the result than in the process, the process being the destruction of 'capitalism', which is their narrow Marxian view of natural economic activity. On a personal level, they don't want others to be demonstrably more successful at life than them, i.e. envy.
So they want to impede or destroy anything that might create greater economic activity or prosperity. That includes oil exploration, production and transportation, shale gas, nuclear power, and, yes, thorium energy. You will see widespread attention being given lately to the dangers of thorium reactors: gamma rays, etc. Only a few years ago it seemed like they would support the "champagne of petroleum". Sure enough they spread their views on aquifer pollution to the point that France, against its interests, now bans gas fracking. We will soon see this happen with thorium.
Appropriately, the countries that are influenced by the socialists will suffer declining influence and those that follow common sense will achieve prosperity. That does not bode well for "developed" nations.
Thorium powered coal to liquids. Best of both worlds!
This might be the first thing he’s done right in a couple of decades
Contributing Editor / Brooklyn, New York
Brian Merchant is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. He covers politics for TreeHugger, with a focus on climate and energy issues. Brian has written for Slate, Paste, Salon, GOOD, and the Huffington Post, among many others.
Brian Merchant profile at TreeHugger.com
Yep, good old Brian looks like your Go-To guy for accurate, unbiased information & commentary on various energy sources....
/sarc
There is no excuse for any power reactor to not be “walk-away safe”. We have over 100 operating nuclear power plants in the US and because of political opposition to a national repository for spent fuel, those power plants are now forced to store spent fuel onsite. Most of those storage facilities require ongoing active cooling.
For me the issue isn’t that the cooling and safety won’t be maintained by competent and dedicated crews. The issue is: what will be the consequences when maintaining cooling is impossible due to some cause that is beyond the ability of the crews and infrastructure to recover from.
This is exactly the case at this very moment in Japan at Fukushima where a tsunami destroyed the ability of the facility to maintain cooling of the spent fuel pool.
It took many years for us to get in this mess. The sooner we start to work our way out, the sooner we won’t have the risk of this kind of disaster to worry about.
I wonder if his support of things like this is the real reason the hard left hates the otherwise rather leftist Gates so much?
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hard to say. Might have something to do with windows.
The environmental movement often appears to me to interested not so much in the environment as it is nature worship. Any form of energy that allows people to not live in mud huts is frowned on
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agree.
Well one of the biggest reasons the Federal labs abandoned the two thorium reactors they were testing — was because they were not dual use. You can’t use thorium for nuclear weapons.
Not the whole MO but certainly a big part of it. Fertility has been going down for quite some time. This decline in fertility has not been attributed to nuclear fission. However, its likely that anyone irradiated with atomic energy will see a decline in their fertility if not their life expectancy.
There is no excuse for any power reactor to not be “walk-away safe”.
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Yeah that’s part of the genius of thorium lftr reactors. they are walk away safe.
imho the oil/gas industry will succeed despite the best efforts of the enviro’s to stifle it.
On the other hand if thorium lftr reactors get made — they will likely eclipse the the hydrocarbon industry because they can produce electricity for about 1/10th the cost of the cheapest coal.
That will result in an enormous increase in the wealth and prosperity of the whole world — in addition to an enormous increase in the use of electrical power—including in automobiles.
I still don’t trust Gates. Every word out of his mouth is related to ‘overpopulation’, ‘sustainability’, ‘reproductive health’ (which we know is a synonym for abortion), and more.
Greenies worship dirt. “Progress” to these people is when the government becomes the repository of all virtue.
Perhaps FR can have a “Thorium” ping?
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