Energy From Thorium

if you intend to work for a startup, I would go for FLiBe Energy, a startup devoted to developing a thorium reactor. That's where I'm hopefully headed after I graduate with a Chemical Eng. degree. To learn more about thorium reactors, you can go here http://energyfromthorium.com/. The story of thorium reactors could be made into a movie, it's that amazing.

It's such a small amount of material that I don't think it much matters how it's shipped, in terms of energy usage compared to what you get out of it. However, U238 is simply not fissile in the absence of lots of high-energy neutrons. It's merely fertile, much like thorium. Here's a picture of thorium stored in the U.S.: https://energyfromthorium.com/2006/07/07/how-to-throw-away-eight-years… Depleted uranium is still used in military large-caliber bullets, and the M1A1 tank uses depleted uranium armor, probably an inch or two thick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chobham_armour#Heavy_metal_modules Some large civilian aircraft have used over a ton of depleted uranium as trim weights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Trim_weights_in_aircraf…

Not all nuclear energy is the same. I encourage people to check out Thorium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium http://energyfromthorium.com/

The reason it's less economical than it could be is because of excessive regulation. We've come a long way with automation and safety engineering. Next-gen nuclear plants could produce energy far less expensively than coal if handled properly - with zero air pollution. Then there's the promise of thorium power: http://energyfromthorium.com

This is not the first time Norway has been interested in Thorium, already in the sixties they had plans to exploit their rather large Thorium deposit. India also has large deposits and also has a trial reactor scheme going similar to the one in Norway with Thorium-Plutonium MOX fuel. There is a lot of information about Thorium on this site: http://energyfromthorium.com/

There's a wealth of information at http://energyfromthorium.com/

> Why would you even invest in anything that looks like that? You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear. I suspect you'll hear something about how nuclear can produce low-footprint 24/7 carbon-free energy in sites all over the world. Certainly I wouldn't expect a traditional investor to invest in nuclear to make a buck. It's mostly people who are trying to build a safe and prosperous world and believe nuclear can help us get there. > you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots". Sure I can. This industry has no pure-nuclear stakeholders. All the owner/operators are utilities, which have vast fossil, wind, solar resources to operate. The utility executives don't give two shoots about nuclear, they only see bottom lines in current markets. Among the vendors, GE is largely divesting from nuclear to make gas and wind turbines. I've seen pro-nuclear advertising, but only in France. I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA. You see wind and natural gas ads all over the damn place. If there were a functional nuclear lobby, you could probably point me to at least one pro-nuclear advertisement on TV. Can you? I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates: * https://mothersfornuclear.org/ -- a bunch of moms who worked at nuclear plants and wanted to tell people that they were actually good * Seattle Friends of Fission: https://seattlefof.org/ …

You wanted comments else you wouldn't be here. I gave comments. I certainly gave some of my own peeves. I thought that was obvious. Look, I'll say this again. You asked which of the two PythonDeveloper thought were desperate. It's pretty obvious that he meant the author of the essay about "the thorium and nuclear advocates." Now you completely agree that you are desperate. Why did you ask the question if you weren't looking for an argument? The non-argumentative one would be "yes, I am desperate; Desperate that we as a civilization won't be able to survive." You think that desperate implies a sneaky agenda. It doesn't. Here are all the dictionary entries: "1. reckless or dangerous because of despair or urgency: a desperate killer. 2. having an urgent need, desire, etc.: desperate for attention. 3. leaving little or no hope; very serious or dangerous: a desperate illness. 4. extremely bad; intolerable or shocking: clothes in desperate taste. 5. extreme or excessive." Notice how none of those imply a sneaky agenda. Nor am I against reactors. I'm explaining, the best I can, why anything associated with nuclear power is viewed with deep distrust. Referencing work from the 1960s doesn't help. That's from the same era of researchers which downplayed the negative consequences of Operation Plowshare. The problem is that the public reaction against decades of official optimism, which deliberately deemphasized the actual consequences, cannot be easily overcome just by more…

This is project pursued by many[1]. The main hurdles are: 1. political [2], which Kirk mentions (it is no coincidence, that the pellets that the rods contain are as standard as the NATO bullet) -- the industry and power has a very different interest 2. technical: Kirk always mentions, that the fuel is not solid. It is liquid. The latter means, that you do have higher concerns about corrosiveness, hence (useful) reactor lifetime... Also, the issue of scale, which tends to lie between 1. and 2. Uranium "won", because you got the real stuff with it (weapons as in actual projection of power, or the capability of threat to project power) and because you could make it work on a massive scale (current reactors are an order of magnitude larger than any LFTR design, and capitalism is based on the leverage of and concentration of power). [1] http://energyfromthorium.com/ http://www.thorenergy.no/ http://thoriumenergy.com.au/ ... besides China, India, France and (even) Czechs. [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/a_is_for_atom.html -> see Seaborg interview part

Actually, that presentation comes from an Areva engineer, not from Stanford. Here's the original (internal?) version: http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/03/30/areva-fd-presentation/ Some interesting intrigue here. Apparently the version you linked redacts the author's name from the second page (Matthias Braun), and removes the signature with his name and the Areva logo from every following page. There's a NYT article that confirms this much: Stanford, where Dr. Hanson is a visiting scholar, posted the slides online after the March presentation. At that time, each of the roughly 30 slides was marked with the Areva symbol or name, and each also gave the name of their author, Matthias Braun. The posted document was later changed to remove all references to Areva, and Dr. Braun and Areva did not reply to questions about what simulation code or codes the company may have used to arrive at its analysis of the Fukushima disaster. “We cannot comment on that,” Jarret Adams, a spokesman for Areva, said of the slide presentation. The reason, he added, was “because it was not an officially released document.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?pagewanted=a…

My favorite idea for this sort of thing is to put a LFTR on a barge (or, better, in a submarine), using seawater for cooling, and ship them out to any coastal area where they're needed. Build them in factories, assemble them in shipyards where such things are relatively easy, and handle the periodic maintenance and refueling in a centralized location. Here's where it gets really fun: you can use the waste heat for desalination. There are a lot of places that sit next to a coastline but are short on electricity and fresh water. Russia is trying to make a lot of money from this, using a variant of the reactors they've been using on their nuclear ice-breaker ships. And if you're using something like a LFTR that's compact enough to fit in a submarine, the water will protect you from hurricanes, earthquakes, aerial attack, and so on. It's a pretty clever scheme. Here's a thread on the Energy From Thorium forums discussing it: http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=55

MSRE had a charcoal-bed off-gas system which safely stored all the noble gases. It was cooled and shielded with water, similar to today's PWRs. PWRs also have water chemistry control and resin-bed filters for primary loop which is highly radioactive and shielded. Construction of the off-gas system is described in pages 58-60 in ORNL-3708: Molten-Salt Reactor Program: Semiannual Progress Report for the Period Ending July 31, 1964 https://energyfromthorium.com/pdf/ORNL-3708.pdf

Scientific American is flat out wrong, compare[1]. (Someone who states that "a breeder creates more fuel than it consumes" has to be wrong about many things.) Common rocks contain about 13ppm uranium and thorium, which gives them a 50x higher energy density than coal[2]. We will never run out of rocks. As a bonus, if we actually "burn the rocks", we end up with a lot of sand to be spread on fields, which counters soil erosion, serves as fertilizer, and captures CO2 through accelerated weathering. In other words, solar power uses land, nuclear power restores land. [1] - http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm#uranium_supply [2] - http://energyfromthorium.com/cubic-meter/

There was a film entitled "The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment" produced in 1969 [0]. Some staff (including the writer-director and cameraman)[1], titling, and some shots are the same (though the end credits of the look more modern). I wouldn't be surprised if they made both films concurrently, though the maintenance film might be later. Does HN support (c1969)? [0]: http://energyfromthorium.com/2016/10/16/ornl-msre-film/ [1] "The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment" * Stephen Sinichak - Writer-Director * C.K. Tipton - Assistant * E.C. Sienknecht - Cameraman * F.E. Frye - Assistant * C.K. McGlothlan - Technical Advisor "Remote Maintenance of Molten Salt Reactors" * Stephen Sinichak - Writer-Director * E. C. Sienknecht - Photographer * Frank E. Frye - Assistant That's likely enough archeology for today.

The government didn't say "give us the one we can make bombs with" or anything like that. In a review [1] they discuss groups working on thorium reactors who find that these reactors are potentially cheaper than water cooled reactors, but there are uncertainties and a demonstration plant is needed. They basically state that thorium reactors might work well, but their potential benefits don't outweigh the existing industrial commitments. Sure, the reason for the existing infrastructure was for the ability to more easily make bombs. But when this was reviewed, it was possible to make bombs with Thorium, too. [2] There are advantages and disadvantages to thorium over common reactors, but it's definitely not a magic bullet. [1]: WASH-1222 (p. 49) http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/WASH-1222.pdf [2]: https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html

The energyfromthorium.com rebuttal of the IEER report is interesting reading as well. http://energyfromthorium.com/ieer-rebuttal/ They take issue with the IEER report judging thorium as a fuel when they are mostly talking about it in a solid fuel reactor. I can't think of any thorium proponents who are proposing solid fuel thorium reactors. The excitement they have over thorium is almost entirely over its use in the LFTR reactor design (which is not without its own design problems but those are distinct from a solid fuel thorium reactor).

Even prior to that in the 1960s the US invented Molten Salt Thorium nuclear reactors at Oak Ridge. They were shelved not because of the abundant supply of Uranium, but rather because they could not be used to make weapons. http://energyfromthorium.com/history.html

> Is there a major technical hurdle ... ? That's exactly my question, too. So I tried to find some alternative view on that topic. Unfortunately, I only found some criticism of questionable quality ... http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/thorium2009factsheet.pdf ... as well as a rebuttal of questionable quality: http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/03/23/sorensen-rebuttal/

energy is solved. http://www.energyfromthorium.com/history.html potable water is solved as a side effect of thorium reactors. food was solved by the Bosch-Haber process, it's a matter of distribution now.