Thorium

Started by Neox, November 11, 2011, 03:31:24 PM

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Neox

For the physics nerds out there:

In the 1950s, a nuclear energy source was discovered which produced a thousand times the amount of energy of a Uranium fuel-cycle reactor with a fraction of the amount of waste with an extraordinarily shorter half-life of volatility after being expended. The reactor itself was impossible to put into a critical state and, in the event of a breach, an attack or a natural disaster, the fuel would drain into a containment vat where it would cool and become inert. The fuel itself is as abundant as the dirt we walk on, and the amount it would take to produce the electricity one person could use in his/her entire lifetime is roughly the size of a marble.

However, once the US government realized that the by-product of the nuclear reaction couldn't be used for nuclear weapons, the project was shut down.

As a budding power-engineer, I learned of this at a power-engineering conference in Burnaby some months ago, where my dad's old boss, Charles (Fred) Konkle, a 1st class power engineer, introduced the concept to all of the people in the room and explained its operation in greater detail. Since then, I've done a bit of my own research and have been looking around different thorium-supporting communities on the internet to see that this indeed ISN'T too good to be true.

http://motherboard.tv/2011/11/9/mot.....-thorium-dream

This video is a short, concise documentary on the thorium movement within North America. We have small communities who are trying to gain financial and political support to revive Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR). Governments across the world are now starting to realize the potential, but the United States and Canada still cling to technology that is extremely dangerous and is rapidly aging.

My dad's ex boss, Fred Konkle, is interviewed at 18:13. I've been exchanging emails with him since meeting him at the IPE conference to find out how the movement is going and I heavily want to be a part of it.

It's crazy to think that WE HAD THIS TECHNOLOGY 40 YEARS AGO. We HAD the technology to save our planet from the vast amounts of pollution we put into the atmosphere every day. We already BUILT and OPERATED one of these reactors in Oak Ridge National Laboratory back in the friggin' 1950s and they SHUT IT DOWN because the effluent of the cycle couldn't be used as weapons-grade nuclear material. These reactors CAN'T have a catastrophe like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi, it is physically impossible due to their design and function.

If you want to know more about LFTRs and Molten Salt Reactors, just ask. I learned a lot from Fred and I can easily show you what I know. =)
NaEthOliX.

Call me Naetholix, Neox, Neo or Steve, I respond to all of them. =)

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Zen

I heard about this months ago. It's like electric cars, there wasn't enough money to be made (and yes, war is a business to the government) so they just scrap the good stuff we should be use. It's sad really.

Awesome concept, I hope that thorium can catch on without the bureaucracy of "it'll cost eleventybillion dollars to upgrade!" from governments.

Neox

There are already private investors taking an interest.  Flibe Energy is kinda the forerunner firm that is trying to get this off the ground.
NaEthOliX.

Call me Naetholix, Neox, Neo or Steve, I respond to all of them. =)

My Weasyl Gallery

Zen

Unfortunately that leaves it at least 10 - 20 years from being useful. These types of things still take for flipping ever to get into mainstream and popular. :(

Sikhoten_Tiger

I've known about Thorium for a while, mainly due to a stint of looking into nuclear power after watching some of the neater Chernobyl documentaries out there. Basically Thorium is an alternative nuclear fuel with some benefits in availability, processing and to a lesser degree radioactivity issues thereafter. The issue with this, and nuclear power as a whole is that since 3-mile and Chernobyl there's been little willingness from the public to support the development and construction of new nuclear reactors. This is where a lot of the benefits of a thorium reactor come from vs a conventional reactor. We've had conceptual and smaller scale testing of liquid fuel, breeder reactors but it's never really been picked up in a big way in spite of the fact that these would improve safety, power generation, fuel efficiency, etc. Things were looking to be getting better as the rising threat of global warming was starting to make nuclear look like an appealing alternative but Fukushima may well have put a fork in that idea.

With regards to who's moving and shaking in the nuclear world India's probably the most relevant to this thread as they already have a commercial Thorium reactor running which looks to be a derivative of our own CANDU reactors which themselves have some significant advantages over PWR reactors namely that from a design standpoint they can 'burn' damn near anything.



Also worthy of note is that Canada doesn't 'cling' to the same sort of nuclear technology that the US does, all of our reactors are of the CANDU type and this is one of our lesser known but definitely valuable high-technology exports. It's also worthy of note that Thorium-salt reactors aren't the only advancements being played with. Russia made a push for liquid metal cooled reactors based on a smaller reactor of that type made for their submarines, sodium, lead and mercury have been considered though the downsides of using the last have meant that most of the focus is on sodium and lead.

Still the largest issue is focused on the fact that public and political reluctance towards nuclear technology has made expansion and upgrade very difficult and very very expensive as evidenced by some of the CANDU reactors built in Ontario recently going wildly over budget.