Long term test of Thorium-Plutonium fuel started

The comment being 'free' ?
Humor. We build nuke plants (high or low power) because we can't see the cost until we're down the road. We build a coal plant because we can't see the cost until we're down the road. We drill in Alaska - then run single hull tankers because we don't weight the potential of the Valddez. We do deep drilling in the gulf with insufficient safe guards because we can't envision the deep water Horizon.
Energy industries sell big numbers on the energy ROI (which are invariably over sold) while they sell little risk. To this very day, the coal industry say coal ash is just harmless dirt. Yet it's heavy metal contents are poison. For folks living near the coal mining industry, it's pretty hard to deny how toxic ash is, when there's mountains all around you. (NIMBY) So ... yea ... a teeny nuke? It seems 'better'. But again, it comes back to whether the unknowns end up being more benign than mountains of coal ash in your back yard ... which is still to this day, sold as being 'not so bad'.
humor. you gotta trust the energy czars making 100's of millions ... who will in no way live right next door to their operations.
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I wasn't rejecting geothermal, I was just stating that it isn't practical in some places. Yes I completely support geothermal and Existing hydro. The problem with new hydro is most of the good places are taken and we get some disasters like have recently happened in china. I don't think anyone would try a nuclear power plant if they had good hydro.

Where I live we have good wind and natural gas. There is no reason to build more nuclear. When our nuc was built, the federal government was blocking natural gas power plants, we didn't understand coal, so it was nuc or coal. The nuclear plant had huge cost over runs, but was built safely other than the problems of waste. I would not turn it off before its useful life is over. The local utilities in Austin and San Antonio rejected NRG's plans to expand the local nuclear plant STP - South Texas Power. They got tepco as a partner, but environmental groups slowed the process - then Fukishima happened, and tepco could no longer own part of the plant. Bottom line is nuclear would have been more expensive than the wind we are building, and the expansion was cancelled. It would be great if something like these thorium/plutonium rods would reduce STP nuclear waste though. I would also like to see San Onofre permanently closed instead of the unsafe scheme SCE is proposing to restart. I also would like potentially unsafe plants like indian point (NY) and Diablo Canyon (CA). On these things I believe we are of the same opinion.

But I don't really want to block indonesia from setting up a small thorium nuc. I don't think the US has that power. The Nuclear plants I really want to block are on fault lines or in my country, or those that countries are building so that they can create weapons. It takes too much effort to say indonesia don't build this nuc, when mountain top coal mining is still going on in the US, and High sulfur coal is being burned in china.

 

Ah I put the lol on the "almost' part. I wasn't agreeing that there was no nuclear waste. There seems to be a move, at least in the utility sector to ask for government money to build nuclear, because coal is so dirty. I couldn't tell which side you were on.

Think of it this way. The environment is improved by a coal plant that uses low sulfur coal and scrubbers versus a 60 year old plant with no scrubbers. This tech produces waste that is radioactive for 300 years instead of tens of thousands. Its better than uranium light water reactors, but no where close to as good as wind, solar, geo thermal. Its likely more expensive than wind in texas or solar in california.

Because of texas's brand of utility regulation its really hard to justify either of those points of view here. Its amazing in some coal states people are still claiming ash is harmless.

Two different articles. The first was different fuel for traditional uranium light water reactors. Think of it like low sulfur coal. Its better than high sulfur coal but its still coal. Its better than refined yellow cake, but it will still produce some nuclear waste, just a much shorter lived version.

The article I put up on small modular thorium is a quite different thing. These reactors are much safer than the one in fukashima because they are sealed, so water doesn't leak out. That prevents the worst case scenario, a melt down if power disappears. Thorium also is non-fissile. This along with the ability for these small plants to be burried, means you don't need to worry about security. Terrorist can't fly a plane into it to blow it up, and can't make a bomb out of the waste. There are other problems though, I can imagine this thing running quite safely powering a desalination plant on an indonesian island. No reason to build one in Texas or California, but no reason to build a coal plant without CCS either.

 

There appears to be no downside to the Thorium Nukes.
Safer, Cleaner ,Uses Nuke waste as fuel,doesnt produce weapons material.
The puzzle is why isnt Obama making its development a USA priority?
My guess is there is a corporate impediment such as Obamas major donors from Exelon nukes or Goldman Sachs who want it sent to the cornfield.
Change you can believe in?
If hes standing in the way of a major social change for the better,I rescind my vote.
The billions wasted on bankrupt solar and battery corporations could have solved the worlds energy concerns.
Cheap safe energy would bring a renaissance to the world.

 

NRC is part of the bureaucracy, they are set up for Uranium light water reactors. The people in congress that want nukes want nukes now, but a SMR thorium reactor of commercial scale wouldn't get approved and built in the US for at least 10 years. That makes it tough politically to give it money.

The DOE under chu, SMR designs have been funded and appear to continue to be funded. These are uranium designs though, so they can make it through the NRC. Politically, Harry Reid blocked Yucca mountain, causing a big headache on what to do with uranium waste.

The DOE is also sharing information with the Chinese on thorium. The US conducted much of the research and has designs fairly far along. The Chinese are pouring a lot of money into thorium research, as they have a great deal of it as waste from mining rare earth, they import uranium, and don't have much domestic natural gas. The Chinese government can move much quicker to approve designs than the NRC. Some don't like the intellectual sharing, and think this will give the chinese a leg up on american/Japanese joint nuclear ventures Westinghouse/Hatachi and GE/Toshiba. Others like me would rather just have the chinese have cheaper cleaner power than the coal plants that cover the country.

The new head of the DOE, Moniz hasn't been able to put his mark on it yet. He is pro nuclear, but he is also pro natural gas. The pro natural gas stand makes large funding for nuclear difficult, as natural gas ccgt power is much less expensive than thorium is likely to be per kwh. If you believe we are not about to run out of gas, you would go slow on new nuclear. This position came up in hearings, from environmentalists that do not like fracking, but the EPA not the DOE regulates fracking.

The biggest energy change in the US right now is more natural gas and wind. I don't think Obama has helped but he certainly has not hurt. Nuclear the way we do it in the US is much more expensive than these sources, and many consider them clean. I would say more consider natural gas clean than nuclear, but all this ghg stuff has flipped some people around. Even with thorium waste will last hundreds of years.

 

I am not sure where I gave the impression that I was suggesting anything. To say nothing of that bit of lunacy.

 

You were calculating how fast we would run out of thorium, if we instantly coverted all energy use to thorium. To do that you would have to disconnect the solar and wind, and shut down the natural gas plants. A more realistic number might be given if you slowly converted the roughly 11% of energy the world gets from nuclear today. Any guesstimate of a resource running out should not be determined by estimating that we do really stupid things like turn off renewables to use more of it. You were suggesting it as part of your straw man argument that we would run out of thorium soon, if we converted everything.

In a similar vein the costs of say getting to 30% wind and solar can be calculated, instead of 100% over a time period. It removes such non-sense as black outs because the sun isn't shining. If natural gas ccgt and ocgt are used well, and replace single cycle thermal gas and coal that can not cycle quickly the costs drop significantly.

China is one of the biggest investors in solar, but it coal smog filled sky's it can not quickly serve its energy needs. We have seen some disasters as it has tried to grab too much hydo.
China Increases Uranium Imports - WSJ.com

 

Yes the 30 MW for Alaska makes perfect sense to me, and I'd probably call anything <75 MW as SMR.

I agree non-weaponizable is important re: Pu (guess they don't call it P-u for nothing!).

 

The small alaskan nuc isn't going to happen

Galena Nuclear Project - Alaska Energy Wiki

 

Sounds like they saying NSSMR (not-s0-small modular reactor) still makes sense for Alaska.

 

SMR at 50 MW or less just doesn't make much sense in the US. Its a great idea if the military can just claim its safe and no one complains, but for civilian power we have the NRC. The cost of NRC regulation is simply to high to make them work. When we get to 100 MW, then there is more of a business case. For thorium SMR it will take a lot of regulatory reform, and the technology will need to prove itself in other places.

 

Right, and I assume my audience is smart enough to realize that if they use it at less than 100% the extinction time will be correspondingly longer. That is what the phrase "the usual caveats apply" was supposed to denote. Are you saying that my audience isn't that smart?

 

A huge amount of data needs to be collected to determine where this can function as a "replacement fuel". I'll give a short listing of some important features that need to be maintained:

1) Neutron flux distribution across the core. There is a significant difference between the fission properties of Thorium/Plutonium vs. U-235/238 fuel. However, the location of all the fuel cells and control rods is fixed and was optimized only for U=235/U-238 fuel characteristics. Eliminating any hot or cold spots using Th/Pu in a U-235/238 optimized geometry is essential to making sure the plant can come close to operating conditions. This level flux distribution must be maintained over the entire core run period.

2) Safety shutdown requirements. For control rods to work (control criticality and provide safety shutdown margins), the balance of all the total plant reactivity parameters needs to be essentially identical even though the fuels are completely different. Especially important is the margin between prompt criticality and steady state criticality.

3) Refueling periods. Getting all these reactivity balances right inside the fuel can be in competition with how often the plant has to be shutdown to refuel. Presently, the U-235/238 interval is about 18 months of run time. If the Th/Pu mixture results in a shorter duration, that will cause massive economic disincentives to use this.

The bottom line here is that safety/operational compatibility with existing infrastructure AND economic viability will take a lot of time to determine. The political characteristics look good, but the operational characteristics will need to fit in a narrow window.

(PS. Commenting on this does not mean I'm a supporter of any spent nuclear fuel to be abandoned on site...which is our present policy.)

 

hurumph. I don't normally like lawyer ball, where you claim something false, but then point out the small print to make it seem like its true.

I do not know your audience. Perhaps they knew that you were exaggerating in your estimate. In any case you should not feel insulted when I point out, that you assumed shutting down all renewable energy to get to your figure. If your purpose was to distort, you may wish to get offended to fool people. If it was to inform, then you should take this helpful criticism and change your estimate. Either way you should not give a figure of 2077 for thorium to run out, without someone questioning your assumptions on how the world could possibly use all this thorium. It seems off by an order of magnitude from most other estimates. Did you hear the estimate, and just pass it along without thinking about the assumptions?

What audience do you think deserves to hear bad assumptions? I don't think that is a normal caveat unless I am listening to a senator discuss energy policy.

 

Agree with that.

It really would be interesting to know the Norwegian angle. It's an interesting gamble if the target were other
European countries given the EU oversight directing the EU members to renewable technology.

 

Norway is the location of the Halden research reactor. I assume that it just happened to be a good place to test this concept, and a Norwegian company made use of it. I don't think there are any plans for Norway to build nuclear power plants. If Norway can help make the French reactors safer and Thor and Westinghouse make money more power to them.

 

Just a hunch here,but in general if you follow the money you can analyze influences.
Who would cheap and safe energy harm financially?
This is like Exxon buying the patent for GMs Saturn battery and burying it.
The answer is it would harm all energy producers including solar and wind producers.
But IMO the entity that would suffer the most would be the UN and the IPCC.
The UN intends to make around 2% of gross WORLD production as a tax on carbon.
Thats Trillions of dollars annually .
If technology can produce energy which doesnt produce CO2 and is clean and safe,which side will the UN and IPCC be on.
Follow the money.