MSR/LFTR development and Chinese Economic Growth.

Note: This is the third part of an three part essay on the the the future non proliferation policies of India and China with respect to the thorium related technologies. The second part of this essay discussed the role of Thorium in India's nuclear development program, and Indian past, present and possible future attitudes towards nonproliferation.

Despite the current extremely robust growth of the Chinese economy during the last decade, some economists, looking ahead see clouds on the horizon. Michael Pettis is a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, and author of the well received book, The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economics and the Threat of Financial Collapse. Pettis is a pessimist about the stability of the international finance order, and sees international boom and bust monitary cycles effecting the economies of developing countries even more than the econmies of developed countries. In a recent article in China Financial Markets, Professor Pettis argues that

we are at the end of one of the six or so major globalization cycles that have occurred in the past two centuries. If I am right, this means that there still is a pretty significant set of major adjustments globally that have to take place before we will have reversed the most important of the many global debt and payments imbalances that have been created during the last two decades. These will be driven overall by a contraction in global liquidity, a sharply rising risk premium, substantial deleveraging, and a sharp contraction in international trade and capital imbalances.

Professor Pettis predicts:

* BRICS and other developing countries have not decoupled in any meaningful sense, and once the current liquidity-driven investment boom subsides the developing world will be hit hard by the global crisis.
* Over the next two years Chinese household consumption will continue declining as a share of GDP.
* Chinese debt levels will continue to rise quickly over the rest of this year and next.
* Chinese growth will begin to slow sharply by 2013-14 and will hit an average of 3% well before the end of the decade.
* Any decline in GDP growth will disproportionately affect investment and so the demand for non-food commodities.
* If the PBoC resists interest rate cuts as inflation declines, China may even begin slowing in 2012.
* Much slower growth in China will not lead to social unrest if China meaningfully rebalances.
* Within three years Beijing will be seriously examining large-scale privatization as part of its adjustment policy.
* European politics will continue to deteriorate rapidly and the major political parties will either become increasingly radicalized or marginalized.
* Spain and several countries, perhaps even Italy (but probably not France) will be forced to leave the euro and restructure their debt with significant debt forgiveness.
* Germany will stubbornly (and foolishly) refuse to bear its share of the burden of the European adjustment, and the subsequent retaliation by the deficit countries will cause German growth to drop to zero or negative for many years.
* Trade protection sentiment in the US will rise inexorably and unemployment stays high for a few more years.

The rest of Professor Pettis's article fleshes out his predictions about the course likely followed by the Chinese economy for the rest of the decade, and the implications of that course for Chines society, and political system. (Hat tip to Brian Wang for his recent post on Professor Pettis's economic forecast.)

It is my view that even if this socio-economic and political crisis strikes China, Global awareness of the grave implications of continued reliance of carbon based energy sources will rise rise rapidly. Thus at the same time China may faces an economic crisis. Even if more conventional estimates of the developmental course of turn out to be correct, China will be faced with the problem of shifting its energy system to post-carbon energy technologies.

Thus what ever the course of the Chinese economy, the need to replace energy from fossil fuel sources, with energy from post carbon sources will start to become acute within the next ten years. Thus what ever its economic situation, China will require rapidly scalable energy technologies that can replace coal and other fossil fuels. At the moment, China appears committed to developing LFTR technology. On February 2, in the wake of the Chinese LFTR announcement I stated on Nuclear Green, I stated:

The potential promise of thorium and the LFTR technology can rapidly be brought into the effort to prevent further global climate change. China, perhaps more than any other country has realized the importance of energy in increasing the wealth of its citizens, and making life for its people better. At the same time, the Chinese have paid an enormous price for their reliance on fossil fuel technology. As many as 500,000 people die every year from fossil fuel related causes. Global Warming represents another large threat to the well-being of the Chinese people, and although China has made a large commitment to renewable energy sources, the Chinese leadership is aware that renewables cannot produce anything like the amount of energy that the Chinese people need to bring their standard of living to that enjoyed by people living in advanced Industrialized and post-industrial societies. At the same time, the Chinese leadership is far more technologically oriented than the leadership of the United States or Europe.

Thus, the leadership of China is far more open to promising new technology. In addition China has a large thorium supply that comes from its rare earth mines, and so far has not found any use for thorium. The LFTR allows China to kill two birds with a single thorium stone. First it offers a potential source of vast amounts of environmentally clean and safe energy at a low cost, and secondly it allows China to take advantage of an unused resource, which can easily replace coal. LFTR technology has the potential of providing China with abundant energy at a very low cost, and might solidify Chinese economic, cultural and political dominance of the world for a long time to come.

What will appeal to Chinese leadership about MSR/LFTR technology during the next decade is its potential for rapid production in large numbers and at a low cost. Uranium fueled MSRs offer a technology that is almost ready for mas production today.

The MSR core is very simple, requires few materials, and can be built with a tiny fraction of the labor required by conventional reactor cores, Other optional parts of the MSR may be more complex, but this is in no small measure because radioactive fission products can be continuously cleaned from the MSR core. The added cost of fuel salt cleaning can be balanced by a diminished cost of other safety features. Both fuel cleaning and reprocessing can be included in the MSR package. Thus the MSR can eliminate the necessity for building a separate large and complex fuel reprocessing facility. Molten Salt Reactor researchers world wide have repeatedly touted their safety. Low cost underground placement would further enhance their safety.

One the other hand the low cost of MSRs, their scalability and the sustainability of of LFTR technology would make LFTR technology an extremely valuable source of post-carbon energy, and quite possibly the dominate energy technology on earth asa soon as 2050. The paths to LFTR development were charted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the 1970's and are well understood. In terms of the potential cost savings that could be achieved through the adoption of LFTR technology the cost of its development would be extremely small, and indeed a number of large American companies could afford to finance LFTR development without government assistance, if they chose to do so.

Nor would MSR/LFTR development take long, if a business as usual approach were abandoned in favor if a more intensive approach. My estimate that if MSR/LFTR development were commenced in China this year, MSRs could be ready to start rolling off production lines by 2020. With factory based mass production, the replacement of carbon based electrical generation could be accomplished in a short time. In addition, to use in electrical generation, LFTRs and be used as an industrial process heat source. They can be used to produce hydrogen, and carbon based liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 and water. They can also be used to power ships.

The principle obstacle to MSR/LFTR development is ignorance and human incredulity. Until recently Molten Salt Reactor technology was not even be mentioned is the training of reactor physicists and nuclear engineers. Past statements about Molten Salt Reactor technology form the Department of Energy are filled with misinformation While Secretary of Energy Chu recently made statements about the LFTR that suggest he had been given the same misinformation. Even when informed about the potential some people are incredulous, or insist that it would take to long to develop to be a practical solution, or that it is too technologically challenging. The Chinese have a significant advantage, because its technologically sophisticated national leadership is aware of the potential that the LFTR offers.

The LFTR approach to world energy issues amounts to a paradigm shift. What will be required for the success of a LFTR based approach is the spread of knowledge about the LFTR and of a vision of LFTR potential. Knowledge and vision cannot simply be spread by policy, and indeed in the United States policy has been an impediment to its spread, until the policy makers themselves are educated, and catch a little of the vision. Once that knowledge and the vision are discovered by enough people, as appears to be the case in China, a tsunami of change will follow that will rapidly sweep us forward into the post carbon age.

Thus by continuing its commitment to develop LFTR technology, Chinese leadership, either Communist or democratic, will almost certainly assure continued Chinese economic development, whatever short run national economic problems emerge in China.

No accurate estimate of China's Thorium reserve is available, but thorium is a common mineral in rare earth mining tilings, and China's rare earth mining industry is by far the largest in the world. My guess is that China holds enough thorium above ground now, to power the entire Chinese economy for hundreds if not thousands of years. The energy potential of this internal, low cost energy source is attractive to China, which like India is dependent on foreign uranium sources for a uranium powered economy, would prefer to have total control of its energy resources.

Historically China has been economically self contained, and although Chinese economic development has focused on international trade, Professor Pettis offers the view that future Chinese economic development will focuse on the growth of internal markets. In addition the Chinese government is under great though largely hidden pressures to clean up environmental problems. Shifting from coal to Thorium would solve serveral environmental problems at the same time. A shife from trade to internal economic grown and increasingf environmental concerns thus point to a rational for thorium energy use as a matter of national policy.

The historic foreign policy of China has usually been to exercise hegemony over its neighbors but to not incorporate them into its empire. In addition, the Chines state has usually defended its territory rather than sought expansion. The present Communist government has acted to insure that traditional Chinese imperial territory remain part of China. The 1949 invasion of Tibet, and the continued Chinese insistence that Taiwan is part of China are evidence of that poi icy, The Chinese Government is also concerned about border defenses, and the 1962 war between China and India was motivated by Chinese desires to obtain defensible southern borders.

Finally China has cooperated with American Nonproliferation policies only when it is in Chinese interests to do so. China has in the past been willing to transfer of nuclear weapons technology and even weapons grade nuclear materials, when the development of nuclear weapons by other states furthered what Chinese leaders viewed as China's national interest. China has viewed India as a potential enemy, and thus its allied itself with another enemy of India Pakistan. China reportedly provided both nuclear weapons design and U-235.

Thus China appears wholly unwilling to adopt nonproliferation goals, that run contrary to its national interests, or the national interests of Allies that it might wish to see possessing nuclear weapons. Furthermore China is unlikely to prefer nonproliferation over national economic or energy policies. To the extent that American policy toward the thorium cycle as a proliferation issue runs contrary to Chinese trade or energy goals, China will be unwilling to give preference to American goals over its own.

Thus if American thorium related nonproliferation policies are contrary to Chinese interest, China can be expected to oppose and even undermine them. China may well regard its own internally developed LFTR as a legitimate trade item, even without proliferation controls preferred by the United States. The United States will have no choice except to adapt its nonproliferation policy to the sort of nonproliferation order that China is willing to accept. China, like India will most likely be willing to support a nonproliferation agreement that embraces thorium, but that order may be quite contrary to current US nonproliferation policy.

Thus both India and China have in the past been notably independent from American nonproliferation policies and goals, and can be expected to maintain that independence. There growing economic power will make that opposition increasingly difficult for the United States to impose its nonproliferation goals on the international community. Both India and China have interests in developing a Thorium cycle nuclear power technology, and it is very likely that any future nonproliferation order will conform to Chinese and Indian policy goals with respect to thorium fuel cycle technology.

The NNL doesn't like Thorium

I look at criticism as something that is positive. If you are on the right track. It may signify that you are getting some where and for that reason people who don't like your purposes may be getting concerned. This I would argue might be the case with thorium. If you are the wrong track, careful attention to he criticism may tell you that you are wasting your time. But critics can also be wrong.

The emergence of thorium cycle criticism is good news, because it signals that Thorium/MSR advocates have accomplished their first goal, which is to make thorium nuclear technology widely known.

A paper titled The Thorium Fuel Cycle offers its readers

an independent review of the thorium fuel cycle by the UK National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), highlighting the strengths and weaknesses not just in the UK context but globally.

First it should be asked how did the staff of the NNL come to its conclusions. Scientists normally would begin an assessment of the potential of a technology with a literature review. In 2005 the International Energy agency published Thorium Fuel Cycle - Potential Benefits and Challenges *IAEA TECDOC-1450). That review tells us how information was collected for its composition

The information on thorium and thorium fuel cycles has been well covered in the IAEA- TECDOC-1155 (May 2000) and IAEA-TECDOC-1319 (November 2002). The objective of the present TECDOC is to make a critical review of recent knowledge on thorium fuel cycle and its potential benefits and challenges, in particular, front end, applying thorium fuel cycle options and back end of thorium fuel cycles. The review has been prepared based on three consultancy meetings held at IAEA, Vienna 1–3 July 2002, 14–16 April 2003 and 15–16 September 2003, where experts from Canada, France, India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, USA and IAEA had participated and supported by information and published papers from specialists on thorium fuels and fuel cycles.

In contrast the NNL review states,

NNL has many years experience of the nuclear fuel cycle and associated science and technology, including fuels, reactors and reprocessing. We are therefore in an ideal position to be able to independently assess and advise decision makers on both current and future fuel cycles such as thorium. The statements in this note are backed up by extensive experience of nuclear R&D and the nuclear industry worldwide, including thorium assessments and programs in which the NNL was involved.

Thus the NNL was relying on its in house expertise on the thorium fuel cycle, but how competent were its researchers to make this judgement? First it would seem that NNL researchers had not participated in the Thorium fuel cycle assessment process conducted by the IAEA. We know that IAEA tells us the countries from which participants in its thorium cycle assessment process had come, and those nations did not include the UK. That

A second difference between the IAEA TECDOC-1450 and the NNL paper is the documentation of the former and the complete lack of documentation in the latter.

Other comparisons between the TECDOC-1450 and the NNL paper are also instructive. TECDOC-1450 states,

In recent years, there has been renewed and additional interest in thorium because of the intrinsic proliferation resistance of thorium fuel cycle due to the presence of 232U and its strong gamma emitting daughter products,

In contrast the NNL states

Contrary to that which many proponents of thorium claim, U-233
should be regarded as posing a definite proliferation risk. For a thorium fuel cycle which falls short of a breeding cycle, uranium fuel would always be needed to supplement the fissile material and there will always be significant (though reduced) plutonium production.

The NNL does not state the reason for its disagreement with the NAEA, nor does it state why it

rejects the widely heald beliefe that the thorium cycle offers more proliferation resistance than the Uranium fuel cycle.

TECDOC-1450 notes

Closed’ 232Th–233U/238U denatured breeder cycle designed to maximize proliferation- resistance by minimal processing of the fuel salt and by addition of 238U to isotopically dilute and denature fissile 233U isotope. Though this lowers the breeding ratio marginally (slightly above 1.0) as compared to 232Th–233U ‘closed’ cycle, it ensures intrinsic proliferation resistance of the fuel cycle.

In other words in a denatured fuel cycle, the breeding ratio would be so close to unity, that the would be weapons builder would be forced to sacrifice his reactor load of fissionable material in order to produce weapons. In addition by diluting U-233 with U-238, Weapons grade U-233 would be difficult to extract.

The NNL claims,

Attempts to lower the fissile content of uranium by adding U-238 are considered to offer only weak protection, as the U-233 could be separated in a centrifuge cascade in the same way that U-235 is separated from U-238 in the standard uranium fuel cycle.

But first most would be proliferators do not possess centrifuge cascade and as Iran has discovered centrifuge technology is not easy to develop, and centrifuges are not available on the open market. Once a would be proliferator who is considering use of U-233 from a denatured thorium reactor faces a choice: Either to pull uranium out of the reactor and process it through centrifuge cascades to obtain weapons grade U-233, or to process ordinary uranium through the centrifuge cascades in order to obtain weapons grade u-235. The benefits of the two processes are the same. The cost of the U-235 path is the problems posed by obtaining the uranium. The would be proliferator may not possess a Uranium mine, or uranium bating resources. Uranium is difficult to obtain on the open market. In contrast obtaining U-233 from the reactor fuel of a unity breeder, would mean that fissionable U-233 that can only be replaced in the reactor by breeding is being withdrawn from the reactor, and will be impossible to replace by breeding. In effect in the long run the denatured U-233-thorium reactor will have to be sacrificed if U-233 is withdrawn for weapons purposes. Secondly U233 is adulterated by U-232 which decays into a extremely dangerous radioactive daughter product. This makes the handling and storage of weapons containing U-233 a far larger problem than the handling and storage of a U-235 based weapon. Centrifuges can be used to separate U-233 and u232, but this would involve more centrifuge cascade than would be required to separate U-235 and U-238, and would be more costly and time consuming. Clearly then the problems posed by attempting to weaponize denatured U-233 from a thorium cycle reactor would be greater than the problems posed by separating U-235 from U-238. Those problems are what is referred to by the term proliferation resistant.

It should be added that proliferation resistance in any reactor does not offer strong proliferation protection. Nuclear weapons proliferation is quite easy and and cheap, and nations do not need or even desire thorium reactors in order to obtain the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Proliferation resistance is about preferred paths to nuclear weapons, not prevention. Proliferation control depends on a strong international order that is capable of keeping weapons technology out of unacceptable hands. To date that international order has had mixed success at best.

A proliferation resistant technology is one which a would be proliferator would prefer to not use because it costs more, presents greater technical difficulties or poses other disadvantages. If a nation already has access to centrifuges capable of separating U-233 from U-238, it already possesses the means to separate weapons grade U-235 from U-238. The IAEA acknowledges that there are greater challenges involved in the weaponization of U-233 than in the weaponization of U-235. Thus contrary to the NNL the weaponization of U-233 produced by thorium breeding is very unlikely.

Thus it would appear that some NNL pronouncements on thorium are in significant conflict with the IAEA assessment. In addition other NNL pronouncements are unrealistically pessimistic. For example the NNL states,

In the foreseeable future (up to the next 20 years), the only realistic prospect for deploying thorium fuels on a commercial basis would be in existing and new build LWRs (e.g., AP1000 and EPR or PHWRs, [e.g. Candu reactors]. Thorium fuel concepts which require first the construction of new reactor types (such as High Temperature Reactor (HTR), fast reactors and Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)) are regarded as viable only in the much longer term (of the order of 40+ years minimum) as this is the length of time before these reactors are expected to be designed, built and reach commercial maturity.

In fact a prototype Indian commercial fast reactor is expected to be online before the end of 2012, while Indian thorium breeding fast breeders are expected to come on line in a little more than a dozen years later. By 2025 India plans to have growing fleets of Thorium Fast Breeder Reactors, and Advanced Heavy Water Reactor unity thorium converters. Thus the NNL estimate appears of the development time for thorium cycle fast breeders may be off by as much as a generation.

It would appear then that the NNL's report on thorium was prepared with less than rigorous preparation. The report includes a number of assertions which are questionable. We now have to ask why did the NNL UK publish this report? The answer can be found in Laboratory Director Paul Howath's statement of purpose at he the beginning of the report,

and advise decision makers on both current and future fuel cycles such as thorium.

It is plausible, given the content of the NNL report, that the NNL has little expertise in the thorium fuel cycle and limited resources. The leadership of the NNL prefers to focus on technology they understands, rather than technology they does not fully understand. The NNL has by now either receive enquiries about thorium cycle nuclear technology from national leaders, or has reason to believe that it will. It thus has a need to offer excuses for a lack of interest in thorium cycle research and development. No one likes to admit that we don't know how, and have our hands full with what we are doing now. The result is a bad report.

The Molten Salt Reactor Family: Fuel

I intend to offer a series of posts designed to explain the sometimes bewildering complexity of Molten Salt Reactor Technology. This first post explains two nuclear fuel breeding cycles.

Rather than offering a single potential reactor design, the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) idea offers a large number of design options, each of which would require a significant amount of research, before a prototype reactor could be built. The Molten Salt Reactor designer is faced with a bewildering number of elective choices, each offering a set of advantages and disadvantages. Each choice that the designer makes will dictate a number of design features some of which require further choices.

Lets start with nuclear fuel. My father first demonstrated that not only U-235 but also Pu-239 could be used as a reactor fuel in MSRs. During the ORNL Molten Salt Reactor experiment Oak Ridge scientists tested the use of the three fissionable materials that can be used as nuclear fuels, Plutonium-239 (Pu-239), Uranium-235 (U-235) and Uranium-233 (U-233). Once during the operation of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) they used all three potential fuels in the reactor at the same time.

Of the three potential fuels, U-233 had some significant advantages. Neither U-235 nor Pu-239 produced enough neutrons per neutron hit, to support breeding more nuclear fuel at a slow (thermal) neutron speed range. U-233, produced by breeding thorium did produce enough neutrons to breed thorium at a slow temperature range. We will see that this offers a very large advantage. U-235 is not efficiently produced by breeding, while Pu-239 can only be produced in the breeding range with fast neutrons.

Breeding means that for every fuel atom used in the nuclear process, at least one new fuel atom is produced. Thus in a plutonium fast breeder, if a neutron strikes a plutonium atom, it is very likely to fission into two smaller atoms, almost always with three neutrons left over. Those neutrons will be moving fast and will contain a lot of energy. Fast neutrons are more likely to produce fission in plutonium atoms than slow neutrons. Neither U-235 nor Pu-239 produce enough neutrons to maintain breeding if they encounter a slow (also called thermal) neutron. Thus Plutonium can only be produced as a nuclear fuel in so called fast reactors. There are, as we shall see, some major disadvantages to fast reactors.

Fast reactors are often thought of as having liquid sodium as their coolant, although liquid lead, and a liquid lead-bismuth mixture have also been used as a coolant in fast reactors. In addition it is possible to build fast Molten Salt Reactors. The stability of Molten Salt Reactor operations in enhanced by Xenon-135 removal. Xenon-135 is a radioactive gas that is a byproduct of nuclear fission and has a very large neutron cross section. Because it is very likely to capture neutrons, Xenon-135 can adversely effect a chain reactor in a reactor. Thus it would be highly desirable to get Xenon-135 out of a reactor core quickly after it is produced. That is impossible in a solid core reactor, but it is not difficult to do in a Molten Salt Reactor. The presence of Xenon-135 adversely effects to the ability of reactors to breed nuclear fuel, so any MSR that is designed as a thorium breeder would have a system for moving Xenon-135 out of its core.

There are decided advantages for fuel reprocessing with MSRs. Compare the fuel reprocessing technique for a Molten Salt Reactor with the fuel reprocessing technique proposed for the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) a LMFBR. In two fluid MSR, the blanket salt flows out of the blanket, and protactinium and U-233 are withdrawn from it by chemical processes. Once they are processed out of the carrier salt, the U-233 is re-fluoridated and returned to the core. The protactinium is set aside until it undergoes a nuclear transformation to U-233, and then that U-233 is returned to the core. In a IFR, the spent fuel is fished out of the reactor core, and once recovered, dumped into a molten salt bath, in which it dissolves. Then by use of electroplating, various material from the old fuel, for example plutonium, are separated out of the bath, and deposited on electrodes. Eventually the separated metal, is recovered, melted and mixed into an alloy, which is then cooled enough to serve as fuel elements, and then returned into the reactor. The MSR fuel reprocessing technology is much simpler than the fuel reprocessing technology designed for the IFR.

In addition fast reactors require 10 times as much nuclear fuel to produce a chain reaction as thermal breeder reactors. It does not really matter if the fast reactor is cooled by liquid metal of liquid salts, a fast breeder reactor just needs a who lot more fuel in order to operate than a thermal breeder reactor does. This makes fast reactors poor candidates to replace fossil fuels like coal with nuclear power, because many reactors will have to be built quickly, and fueling enough fast reactors quickly will be a big challenge.

There are two breeding cycles, the Uranium 238 breeding cucle, and the thorium 232 breeding cycle. Both cycles have some advantage. Plutonium-239 produces more neutrons per fission event than thorium, but fewer fission events per neutron in the thermal spectrum. In fact Pu-239 produces so many fewer fission events in the thermal spectrum than in the fast spectrum, that it is impossible to achieve a positive breeding ratio for the U-238/Pu-239 breeding cycle in a thermal reactor. On the other nand U-233 produces about as many neutrons per fission event in the thermal range as in the fast range, and about as many fission events. That means that the Th-232/U-233 breeding cycle is as effective in the thermal range asin the fast range, and because thorium breeding only requires about 10% of the nuclear fuel in the thermal range as U-238 breeding requires in the fast range, thorium breeding cycle reactors can be deployed far faster.

In addition Liquid fuel reactors have advantages over solid fuel reactors. Once a sollid fuel is inserted into a reactor it almost always stayes there for a year or more, while fission products build up in the fuel. We have already seen that Xenon-135 becomes a reactor control problem, although Xenon-135 eventually reaches an equalibrium because of its short half-life. The presence of Xenon-135 in a nuclear core, can interfear with a reactor's capacity to bread, especially in the thermal breeding range. Thus Thorium fuel cycle breeder reactor are better candidates for rapid deployment than U-238 fuel cycle breeders, and liquid fuel thorium breeding reactors have advantages as solid fuel thorium breeder. Liquid fueled thorium breeders, as we have already noted, have advantages over solid fuel U-238 breeders. Thus the Thorium fuel cycle Molten Salt Reactor (often called the LFTR) would seem to offer several advantages over U-238 fuel cycle liquid metal fast reactor.

In the next post of this series I intend to explain the difference between single fluid and twoi fluid Molten Salt Reactors.

Kurt Cobb on Resources, Energy, Thorium and Molten Salt Reactor Technology

Kurt Cobb, is an energy writer whose vision is in many respects clear headed, and who has acknowledged both the problems and potential while appearing to be intrigued by Molten Salt Reactor/thorium fuel cycle ideas. Cobb has understood that nuclear power offered a solution to the future problems of global energy. In 2009 Cobb identified the problem,

The end of the fossil fuel era is coming sooner than most people believe as exponentially increasing fossil fuel consumption brings us ever closer to the day when production will peak for oil, natural gas and coal and then begin irrevocable declines. The only options left for powering a modern technical society will then be solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectric, geothermal and nuclear. And of these, only nuclear can conceivably be located wherever it is needed at the scale required.

The earth, Cobb argued, had plenty of resources needed to sustain industrial civilization,

granite contains many common metals such aluminum, iron, magnesium, titanium and manganese. Many more minerals including uranium are available in quantities of parts per million. Seawater contains most of the elements on the periodic table, the source of which is the erosion produced by streams and rivers feeding the oceans. The air contains rare "noble" gases that are important to industrial civilization including argon, neon, helium, krypton and xenon.

The visions of the resource optimists may not work out

here's why the future may not work out as Simon and other cornucopians envision. The main energy resources we use today are mineral resources. Oil, natural gas, and coal provide 86 percent of the world's energy. All of these resources are thought to be growing more abundant through the magic of the resource pyramid. But, if you examine the pyramid closely, you will see that not only do low-grade fossil fuel resources require better technology to extract them, they also require increasing amounts of energy to run that technology. At some point the amount of energy needed to bring low-grade deposits of oil, natural gas and coal to the surface and process and transport them will be more than the energy we get from these resources. At that point they will cease to be energy sources, and the vast, remaining ultra-low-grade deposits of these fuels will be useless to us except perhaps as feedstocks for chemicals.

Cobb adds,

Without a transition to vast new supplies of nuclear and renewable energy, the promise that we will be able to go all the way to the bottom of the resource pyramid is a mere daydream. The resource pyramid only shows what is possible. It does not guarantee that humans will achieve it. If peaks in fossil fuel production are nearing, either society will have to learn to get along without many of its critical resources, or it will have to make the transition to alternative energy swiftly as part of an engineering and planning feat that would be unparalleled in human history.

Cobb is pessimistic about the ability of society to make a rapid and timely transition to post fossil fuel energy sources,

Despite the pressing need for a rapid energy transition, it is doubtful that such a transition will be initiated by market forces before fossil fuels become scarce and therefore very expensive. The reason for this is that markets consistently wrongly assess the mineral economy, projecting what resource economist Douglas Reynolds calls "the illusion of decreasing scarcity." That means that prices stay relatively low until shortly before a resource peaks. . .

Because of the very long lead times required to transform our liquid-fuel based infrastructure, for example, into one that runs on electricity, undertaking such a conversion while oil or other fossil fuel supplies are declining could be very challenging indeed. The alternatives may not expand quickly enough to make up for the energy being lost. In that case, the whole transition project would be imperiled by the declining total energy available to society. That means that money and therefore energy would have to be taken from somewhere else in an already squeezed economy to keep the transition going. Contrary to expectations that so-called green industries will create new jobs, this scenario would result in the creation of new green jobs probably at the expense of jobs elsewhere in the economy (that is, barring improbable and extraordinary sudden leaps in the energy efficiency of the economy).

In such circumstances most people would naturally be focused on just making it through the day with little concern or appetite for spending a considerable amount of their incomes to buy electric cars or retrofit their homes for energy efficiency or passive solar heat. Nor would there likely be much appetite for raising taxes for a government-led transition program and/or set of subsidies related to making a transition away from fossil fuels.

Given the current skyrocketing prices of all fossil fuels, it appears that we are very late in the game indeed. It is not clear that a transition program started now would be completed before oil and possibly natural gas began to decline. But, it is clear that the public--at least in the United States--already has little appetite for a government-led solution when the major U. S. presidential candidates are proposing to lower gasoline taxes this summer to ease the burden on family budgets.

Cobb argued that renewable electrical generators poses difficulties for powering a civilization because of their energy density problem,

Let's take a 500-megawatt power plant which by itself can power a city of 300,000. (A megawatt is one million watts.) It will sit astride a fairly large plot of land. A coal-fired plant near me is just under that capacity (495 MW) and sits on about 300 acres. Most of that land, however, is essentially devoted to undeveloped transmission right-of-way filled with ponds, woods and streams. Only a small portion is covered by plant facilities including coal storage. I estimate less than 30 acres.

For new wind projects huge 5-megawatt wind generators are just now being deployed. If we take these as typical (and they are not), then using an estimate of the direct land footprint for wind towers of 0.38 acres per tower, we find that we'd need 100 towers covering 38 acres. But wind turbines run at only about 30 percent capacity because the wind doesn't blow all the time. This compares to about 70 percent capacity for coal-fired power plants. So we need to multiply 100 towers by about 2 1/3 to get the number of towers we'd need to match the operating capacity of one coal-fired plant. That means we'd need about 233 towers with a direct land footprint of 87 acres. That doesn't seem too bad. And, the land under the turbines is still available for farming and other purposes. The overall direct effects on the land and water are certainly less when compared to the coal plant.

But we're not done. The spacing between towers is typically at least five diameters of the rotor. That doesn't sound like much. But for the 5-megawatt towers in this example, the spacing would be 2,065 feet times 232--we don't need to separate the last tower from another tower beyond it. Then we'd add the diameter of the rotors--413 feet times 233--and we get a distance equivalent to about 110 miles. So, we'd need a line of 5-megawatt turbines stretching 110 miles. In theory, we'd want to split them up and put them in various locations in which the wind blows hardest at different times. But the total length of the line would still be at least 110 miles. If we take the largest separation recommended between towers which is 10 diameters of the rotors, we'd have to just about double that distance.

By comparison most people who live 110 miles from a coal-fired power plant are rarely even aware that it might be a source of electricity for them. And, the plant is certainly not a direct irritation. The lesson here, however, is not one of aesthetics. It is an illustration of the disparity in power densities between those energy sources on which we currently rely and the alternatives now being proposed and deployed.

The power density problem for solar energy is no less daunting.

Cobb then puts his finger on the problem,

We will be obliged to devote vast tracts of space--far more vast than the buildings they serve--to support the energy use of our current infrastructure.

This may not be impossible, but it will certainly be costly and socially disruptive.

In 2008 Cobb saw the failure of the first nuclear age as a potential tragedy for humanity. Cobb wrote,

It is a sad commentary that so many who knew the planet would one day run short of fossil fuels were unable to convince the world to embrace nuclear power in a more thoroughgoing way. With enough development, with careful and serious attention to the waste problem, and with lower-cost, decentralized designs that maximize safety, nuclear power might have succeeded in making any decline in fossil fuel availability just another historical footnote--but only if deployed on a large enough scale and far enough in advance of such a decline.

Now it may be too late. The time for the development of the nuclear economy appears to have come and gone with few people even realizing it.

Yet in the same essay, Cobb criticized the Price-Anderson Act by characterizing it as limiting the

liability for nuclear plant operators.

In fact Price-Anderson arguably protects the government from the consequences of having to pick up the first ten billion dollars of the bill, in the event of a major nuclear accident. The major accomplishment of Price Anderson is to set up an insurance pool that protects under funded nuclear operators.

Even in 2008 Cobb was prepaired to engage in real dialogue with nuclear supporters, and too acknowledge,

The solution, of course, is to build breeder reactors and I have seen designs which address the proliferation problem, in part, by using a hybrid technology that allows non-breeder and breeder operation in sequence and so the reactor doesn't have to be refueled for something on the order of 50 years.

Cobb was pessimistic about such a future,however,

I have come to the conclusion that the regulatory hurdles facing such designs are so great that it is unlikely they will be approved and built in time to address the energy deficits we will be facing after fossil fuels peak.

Cobb believed that the idea of using thorium as a basis for the nuclear fuel cycle was promising, and

besides availability, thorium has three additional distinct advantages over uranium fuel. First, thorium fuel elements can be designed in a way that make it difficult to recover the fissile uranium produced by breeding for bomb making. This reduces the likelihood of nuclear weapons spreading to nonnuclear nations that adopt thorium-based fuel technologies.

Second, the waste stream can be considerably smaller since unlike current reactors which often use only about 2 percent of the available fuel, thorium-fueled reactors with optimal designs could burn nearly all of the fuel. This is the main reason besides its sheer natural abundance that thorium could provide such long-lived supplies of fuel for nuclear power.

Third, the danger from the waste of the thorium fuel cycle is potentially far less long-lived. The claim is that the reprocessed waste will be no more radioactive than thorium ore after about 300 years. This claim is based on the idea that virtually all of the long-lived radioactive products of breeding will be consumed in the reactor before the final round of reprocessing takes place.

Cobb also notes the potential usefulness and value of Molten Salt Reactors in managing the thorium fuel cycle,

There are also practical hurdles for reprocessing solid fuel. But advocates of the so-called molten salt reactor claim that this design lessens the problem of reprocessing since the products of breeding can be continuously extracted and processed from the molten liquid stream inside a closed fuel cycle. They also claim that the design is far less prone to accidents which might release radioactive materials into the environment. None of this, of course, solves the problems of existing reactors that use solid fuel assemblies. But it does suggest a plausible course for vastly expanding nuclear power generation with little worry about fuel supplies and fewer concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation.

Cobb points to what he believes is a possible problem with MSR nuclear technology,

The main concern about these replacements is whether they can be built fast enough to head off an overall reduction in the amount of energy available to society.

I will address this concern.

Cobb's latest essay on nuclear technology is titled, "The Road to Fukushima: The Nuclear Industry's Wrong Turn." While Cobb does not mention either Nuclear Green or Charles Barton, many of the ideas in this essay parallel, indas I have frequently expressed. The lead sentence to Cobb's essay states,

Nuclear researchers knew long ago that reactor designs now in wide use had already been bested in safety by another design.

Then Cobb asks,

Why did the industry turn its back on that design?

This is indeed a very troubling question, and one to which I have devoted a number of posts on Nuclear Green. Cobb asks,

Imagine a nuclear reactor that runs on fuel that could power civilization for millennia; cannot melt down; resists weapons proliferation; can be built on a relatively small parcel of land; and produces little hazardous waste. It sounds like a good idea, and it was a well-tested reality in 1970 when it was abandoned for the current crop of reactors that subject society to the kinds of catastrophes now on display in Japan.

This rather remarkable design is called the molten salt reactor (MSR), and it lost out for two reasons: 1) It wasn't compatible with the U.S. government's desire to have a civilian nuclear program that would have dual use, that is, that could supply the military with nuclear bomb-making materials. 2) Uranium-fueled light water reactors, which are in wide use today, already had a large, expensive infrastructure supporting them back in 1970. To build MSRs would have required the entire industry to retool or at least create another expensive parallel infrastructure. And, that's how MSRs became the victim of lock-in.

Much of this simply parafrases Nuclear Green, although I have recently offered a somewhat more complex view on why the government turned its back on Molten Salt Reactor technology.

Whatever the actual reason for the exclusion of Molten Salt Reactor technology by the United States Government, Cobb is quite correct about the consequences of that decision,

Lock-in has worked in much the same way for the nuclear industry. The decision within U.S. government circles to focus on light water reactors and abandon MSRs relegated the latter to a footnote in the history of civilian nuclear power. And, because the United States was the leader in civilian nuclear technology at the time, every nation followed us.

Then Cobb points to an important question,

So, should the world look again at this "old" technology as a way forward for nuclear power after Fukushima?

Cobb answers his own question,

My sympathies are with the MSR advocates. If the world had adopted MSR technology early on, there would have been no partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, no explosion at Chernobyl, and no meltdown and subsequent dispersion of radioactive byproducts into the air and water at Fukushima. It's true that MSR technology is not foolproof. But its very design prevents known catastrophic problems from developing. The nuclear fuel is dissolved in molten salt which, counterintuitively, is the coolant. If the reactor overheats, a plug at the base melts away draining the molten salt into holding tanks that allow it to cool down. Only gravity is required, so power outages don't matter.

As for leaks, a coolant leak (that is a water leak) in a light water reactor, can quickly become dangerous. If there is a leak from an MSR, the fuel, which is dissolved in the molten salt, leaks out with it, thereby withdrawing the source of the heat. You end up with a radioactive mess inside the containment building, but that's about it.

If the world had adopted MSRs at the beginning of the development of civilian nuclear power, electricity production might now be dominated by them. And, we might be busily constructing wind generators and solar panels to replace the remaining coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Would there have been accidents at MSRs? Certainly. Would these accidents have been large enough and scary enough to end new orders for nuclear power plants as happened after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States? I doubt it.

Cobb is still pessimistic however,

Having said all this, I believe that MSR technology will never be widely adopted. The same problem that derailed it early in the history of civilian nuclear power is still with us. We still have lock-in for light water reactors. Yes, the new designs are admittedly quite a bit safer. But these designs still don't solve as many problems as MSRs do, and they continue to rely on uranium for their fuel. MSRs have shown themselves capable of running on thorium, a metal that is three times more abundant than uranium, and 400 times more abundant than the only isotope of uranium that can be used for fuel, U-235. This is the basis for the claim that MSRs fueled with thorium could power civilization for millennia. . . .

. . . in the United States it is easier to predict that we'll see little progress. In the U.S. it is the industry that tells the government what new nuclear technologies will be developed rather than the other way around. And, the American nuclear industry is committed to light water reactors.

I believe that even if the Fukushima accident had not occurred, nuclear power generation would probably have done no more than maintain its share of the total energy pie in the coming decades. Now, I am convinced that that share will shrink as people in democratic societies reject new nuclear plants.

Yet Cobb also acknowledges that one nation is interested in developing Molten Salt Reactor Technology,

The Chinese have announced that they are interested in pursuing MSRs and the use of thorium to fuel them. Perhaps in China--where the nuclear industry is synonymous with the government and therefore does what the government tells it to--MSRs might actually be deployed. I have my doubts. Even China suffers from the lock-in problem.

I disagree with Cobb's pessimism. Although I believe what he calls the "Nuclear Industry, the current small set of reactor manufactures outside Canada, India and China are wedded to Light Water Reactor technology, the path to the development and deployment to Molten Salt Reactors is open wide open. Molten Salt Reactors are simpler, will require less labor to construct, and fewer building materials than Light Water Reactors. This means that there is a high likelihood that Molten Salt Reactors will be cheaper to manufacture, and simpler to deploy. This gives MSRs superior scalability. MSRs are also more efficient than LWRs. MSRs can do things that neither renewables nor LWRs can do. They can produce industrial process heat of up to !200 C. With their lower costs, MSRs can offer back up generation and peak generation capacity to the electrical industry.

Thus the question is will MSRs spread from China, which appears to be committed to the development of MSR technology, or will MSR technology be developed by other societies as well? There are several paths to MSR development. MSRs could be developed in the United States by one or more National Laboratories, MSR technology can be developed as a ship propulsion technology by the United States Navy. MSR technology can be developed by the United States military as a means of supplying electricity to military bases, and for military operations. MSR technology can be developed by private manufacturing businesses, which are interested in turning their manufacturing skills into a new source of energy related revenue. MSR technology could be developed by large fossil fuel energy companies, which seek a means of remaining in the energy business after their fossil fuel business declines. MSR technology could also be developed by a group of nations, which are attracted by the energy advantages MSRs offer. Thus there are many potential pathos to MSR development, and once adventurers start down one of them, other paths are likely to quickly open up.

When I began to write about MSRs in 2007, virtually no one had heard of them. On the Internet I found, Bruce Hoglund's Molten Salt Interest Pages, and Kirk Sorensen's Energy from Thorium. Fast forward to 2011, and the Molten Salt Reactor, mainly in the form of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, a name given by Kirk Sorensen, is widely known. The idea of a thorium fuel cycle Molten Salt Reactor has been adopted for development by China as a promising new nuclear technology, as Kurt Cobb has pointed out. Other parties are looking with interest, but have not announced plans yet. I expect some MSR development plans to emerge before the end of 2012.

China starts LFTR Development Project

China has become the first nation to begin a LFTR development project. Hua Bei announced Friday in a new Energy from Thorium Discussion thread that

Five days ago, China just started the TMSR project in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual report conference, which indicates that China has joined the international MSR club officially. Chinese TMSR project is one of the first four launched projects in 2011, as can be called the "Strategic and Leading Project of Science and Technology". Its ultimate target is to investigate and develop a whole new nuclear system ( thorium based molten salt nuclear system) in about 20 years. The website link of related reports are as follow.
http://www.cas.cn/xw/zyxw/ttxw/201101/t ... 7050.shtml
http://whb.news365.com.cn/yw/201101/t20 ... 944856.htm

The LFTR (TMSR) was first developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers between 1950 and 1975, and has been discussed in detail on Energy from Thorium and Nuclear Green. During the last decade by The Reactor Physics Group of the University of Grenoble has renewed TMSR research. This step is highly rational for the Chinese to take. China appears to have a large thorium reserve, much of it now in the form of rare earth mining tailings. LFTRs as so efficient that they could supply China with all the energy it needs for a period of time that could streach out for millions of years. LFTRs can be factory built and rapidly deployed in Very large numbers. A large scale LFTR program would enable China to replaced fossil fuel energy sources with nuclear power by 2050, if LFTR development had a 20 year gestation period.

Kirk Sorenson at Energy From Thorium has a deperate story on the Chinese TMSR plan.

John Large, Greenpeace Hired Gun

A question has arrisen about John Large. who was cast as a foil to Kirk Sorensen, on a Russia Today video yesterday. Large claimed that

the thorium reactors do not really work, . . They are very challenging. It is a whole new fuel technology which has considerable and very insurmountable problems, in my opinion.

Large, who is a consulting nuclear engineer with Large and Associates, stated,

They would have problems in developing the processing cycle, the way in which you split the fuel from the waste from the reactor. They would have difficulties in actually storing the fuel.

Large also stated that Thorium reactors failed during the 1950's and disappeared from view only to reemerge about 2010.

Our first question is who is John Large? The answer is that John Large is a consulting nuclear engineer who appears to have acted on a number of occasions as a hired gun expert for Greenpeace. (For example, see here, here, and here.) Some expert hired guns are genuine experts who stick to facts and logic, while others employ logical fallacies, and misrepresentations of fact, to further the cases that they are attempting to make. Facts and logic, are not generally speaking Greenpeace strong points, and thus Mr. Large's statements cannot be automatically credited with adhering to the highest professional standards.

As far as I have been able to determine, the Russia today interview, represented John Large's first statement on the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel, and about thorium breeding nuclear technology. Since Large does not offer evidence to back up any of his statements, and in fact has made any public statements orally or in writing, about thorium or thorium breeding technology, it is impossible to know why he makes the claims he makes. Further more a number of the statements he made in the RT interview, were contrary to known facts. For example there were, contrary to Large, thorium based reactors operated after the 1950's. At least some thorium based reactors were not by any means failures. Finally, ORNL gave a great deal of attention to thorium fuel reprocessing in the 1960's and 70's. And while hey did find some difficulties, the difficulties were not overwhelming, and ORNL researchers made steady progress toward solving them. In the absence of greater specificity, we must conclude that a number of Large's claims were based on inaccurate information. of course, Large may offer us the information that he has so far withheld in support of his questionable statements.

Once again we note the hazard to media credibility that comes from automatically attributing expert status to the hired guns of partisan causes.

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RT: Thorium Might Change the World

Energy from Thorium Discussion On Target.

Kirk Sorenson gave his blog, Energy From Thorium, an unusual three part organization. First, there is a document repository, which contains pdf copies of hundreds of research document, most of which originated in Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The repository documents ORNL research and thinking about a unique and until recently poorly understood Molten Salt Reactor technology that was developed in Oak Ridge over a period of a generation between 1947 and 1980. The document repository contains one of the larger energy related sets of documents accessible on the internet. The other two parts of Kirk's blog might be viewed as commentary on the documents.

The second part of the blog is conventional blog, with posts that date back from 2006 to the present. Most of the blog posts can be viewed as commentary on the document repository. Some blog Posts discuss the history of Molten Salt Reactor technology development at Oak Ridge. Some posts also describe scientists, engineers, bureaucrats and politicians whose lives at least touched on Molten Salt Reactor development. Other posts describe individual documents contained in the repository, and still other posts explore potential designs and uses of Molten Salt Reactors.

The third part of Energy from Thorium is a Discussion Forum. The EfT discussion forum contains a great deal of commentary on the documents found in the EfT archive. There are currently over 700 registered members of the EfT forum, and they are a diverse lot, including scientist, engineers, students, lay people, technophiles, geeks and bloggers. You do not have to be a nuclear scientist to read and participate in EfT discussions. No one gets put down for asking questions intended to fill gaps in their knowledge. Since Kirk Started started EFT in late 2006 over 700 people have joined the site. Those 700 + people have generated over 28,000 comments on over 1800 topics.

Although the the central focus of the discussion is on the thorium breeding version of the molten salt reactor, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), just about any matter that is energy related is fair gain for comment. Discussions are conducted on a technical, simi-technical and non technical levels. Anyone who has a passing interest in nuclear engineering, can learn all they would like to know about MSR/LFTR design. Even more exotic liquid chloride fast reactors receive attention. Water cooled, gas cooled, liquid metal, and hybrid liquid salt cooled reactors receive heir own sub-sections. Still other sections deal with Uranium Enrichment and the Uranium and Thorium supply.

The EfT forum is sometimes described as open science, but this is not quite accurate. EfT discussion at best attempts to draw plausible conclusions from reactor technology research that was conducted at ORNL between 1950 and 1980. ORNL researchers regarded their MSR research project a major success, with large implications for the future of energy, and human economic development. It is not absurd to speak of an ORNL Paradigm, which informs much of EfT the discussion. At its broadest, the EfT discussion reflects the earliest stage of a potential paradigm shift.

Discussions run far afield from MSR/LFTR technology. One current discussion focuses on the Cape Wind project. Topics such as the nuclear proliferation potential of MSR/LFTRs are hotly debated. Other discussions focus on cancer risks from the use of radiation and radioactive materials in medical settings. Potential nuclear waste associated with LFTR operations comes in for attention, as does the role of nuclear waste in public opposition to nuclear power.

One goal of the EfT is the growth of public knowledge of the potential of LFTRs and of the Thorium fuel cycle. A sub-forum, Thorium in the News tracks the increase of media attention to the LFTR/thorium story.

Other forum sub-sections deal with nuclear developments in the United States, Canada, Europe, China, Japan, Korea, Europe and India. These sections allow for exploration of topics related to more conventional nuclear technology.

The discussion section format is flexible, and some of the ORNL and related papers found in the archive are reproduced and/or discussed here. Much of the discussion in the EfT discussion forum is dependent on acquaintance with documents found in the archive. EfT participants are skeptical of claims made by the renewable energy lobby. This cannot be simply due to pro, nuclear prejudice, most commenters take a fact based approach to questions about renewable reliability and cost. Critics of nuclear power get quite a pasting from EfT commenters., with well known energy writer Joe Romm standing at the head of the EfT unpopularity list.

For 2 1/2 years EfT participants have worked on a Thorium Grand Plan. Over 500 suggestions have been offered to date.

EfT is far from being a typical blog. It is a major venue for internet based energy discussion, with much attention focused on advanced forms of nuclear energy. The EfT discussion, as it explores the future potentials of nuclear energy, is beginning to effect broaded energy discussions in out society. 2010 is beginning to look like the year during which the EfT broak through to the mainstream media. A story in the January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine, featured Thorium, the LFTR and Kirk Sorensen. More attention has recently followed in science and engineering media. Thorium related stories and videos are showing up in unlikely places. There is a thorium buzz on Twitter, There is a growing interest in Congress.

All this is quite an accomplishment for a 3 1/2 year old endeavor.

Understanding Molten Salt Reactors: 1. How are MSRs Different from LFTRs?

The name Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) is more inclusive than the name Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). The LFTR is a type of Molten Salt Reactor that features the use fluoride salts and a thorium fuel cycle. Strictly speaking a LFTR need not be designed to produce fuel in a breeding range, but breeding is an important justification for the use of the thorium rather than the uranium fuel cycle.

In chemistry a salt is an ionic compound that is produced when acid undergoes a neutralizing reaction with a base. Some salts are compounds of metallic and non-metallic elements. Salts become molten (or liquid) when heated. Different salts have very different melting temperatures. Some salts may melt at relatively low temperatures, while other salts require several hundred degrees centigrade of heat before they melt. Mixed combinations of salts may melt at a lower temperature than individual salts will melt.

Some molten salts are very good conductors of heat, and some molten salts may not boil until they reach 1400 degrees centigrade, or even higher. These qualities make molten salts potentially excellent coolants for high temperature reactors. Research on high temperature fluoride salt cooled reactors continues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Two families of salts have been identified as potentially excellent reactor coolants. They are Fluoride and Chloride salts. Of these two salt families, ORNL scientists quickly chose the former, as presenting fewer developmental challenges while offering greater opportunities for commercial reactor use. Liquid chloride salts were identified as presenting more problems for reactor developers. Chlorine was, in particular, less useful as a neutron moderator than fluorine. However, Chloride salts were suitable for fast reactors, and a Molten Chloride Fast Breeder Reactor was both possible, and probably technologically less challenging than the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor, as a uranium fuel cycle breeder. In addition, the MCFBR would have offered far fewer safety problems than the LMFBR, while offering a route to technologically superior and lower cost fuel reprocessing.

ORNL Scientists however, also noted that liquid fluoride salt offered a superior performance precisely because of their neutron moderating performance. Moderation removes energy from neutrons. Heavily moderated neutrons are called thermal neutrons, and reactors that are built with large amounts of neutrons moderating materials such as graphite or heavy water are called thermal reactors. Neutron moderation decreases the amount of fissionable material required to sustain a chain reaction, and graphite and heavy water moderated reactors can produce chain reactions with natural uranium. While graphite and heavy water moderated reactors are useful tools for the production of plutonium, they are not particularly efficient tools for burning Pu-239 or even U-235 as nuclear fuels. However, it is possible to breed thorium in thermal reactors. Thermal reactor breeding of thorium offers significant advantages over fast reactor breeding of U-238. Thermal Reactors can operate with 10% perhaps as little as 3% of the fissionable material required to operate fast reactors. Thus thermal reactors can potentially be started at a far more rapid rate than fast reactors.

Fast reactor advocates claim that it is possible for fast reactors to breed at a much more rapid rate, but there appear to be safety problems involved in more rapid fast reactor breeding, and current documented advanced fast reactor designs appear to breed at a similar rate to thermal thorium breeding molten salt reactors.

The term breeding refers to the production more nuclear fuel than is used in a nuclear reactor. If a fertile material, either uranium 238 or thorium 232, is included with the fissionable material placed inside a reactor core along, the result will almost inevitably be the conversion of some of that fertile material into a fissionable material. In the case of thorium, a thorium 232 atom inside the reactor can absorb a neutron, and then becomes a thorium 233 atom. The nucleus, that is the center, of a thorium 233 atom is unstable. A neutron in the unstable Th 233 atom will eventually emit an electron, changing the neutron to a proton, the new proton in turn converts the atom to protactinium 233, and Pa 233 is also unstable. After a few days, a Pa neutron emits an electron, and as a consequence converts to a proton. The added proton makes the atom uranium 233. U 233 is fissionable, and can be used as reactor fuel.

The uranium fuel cycle is similar. If an U-238 atom absorbs a neutron a process that is similar to the process we find with thorium 233 occurs, and the U-239 atom is converted into plutonium 239.

Most reactors produce added nuclear fuel by converting U-238 into Pu-239. The amount of plutonium produced usually equals somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of the amount of U-235 burned in a conventional reactor. Neither U-235 nor Pu-239 are ideal nuclear fuels at conventional neutron speed. WASH-1097 states

From a nuclear standpoint, the use of U-233 in a thermal reactor makes it possible to achieve higher fuel conversion ratios and longer fuel burnups than is practical with either U-235 or Pu-239. . .

The higher conversion ratios which can be obtained in thermal-spectrum reactors when using U- 233 instead of Pu-239 can result in a significantly better utilization of natural uranium fuel resources with thorium-fueled reactors than with the low-enrichment, light-water cooled uranium-fueled reactors . . .

WASH-1097 defines the fuel conversion ratio,

The fuel conversion ratio (CR) is the ratio of the amount of fissile fuel produced per unit of fissile fuel destroyed. . .

Breeding takes place when the conversion ration is greater than 1 to 1. While plutonium theoretically produces more neutrons and therefore faster breeding in fast reactors,

A higher breeding ratio can be obtained with Pu-239 than with U-233 in a very high-energy, fast- neutron spectrum reactor. On the other hand, in a degraded (10 to 100 keV) fast spectrum, U-233 would probably be as good as, or better than, Pu-239. Also, the variation of U-233 and Pu-239 cross sections with energy are such that improved reactivity coefficients would be obtained with the use of U-233 in a large sodium-cooled FBR. This leads to improved nuclear safety characteristics. . . .

The energy dependence of the fast-fission cross sections of Th-232 and U-238 is such that the use of Th-232 would produce an improved reactivity coefficient in a liquid-metal-cooled FBR. The fast fission cross-section of Th-232 is much lower than that of U-238 so that use of the latter leads to much larger conversion ratios in fast-spectrum reactors.

Thus not only is thorium breeding attractive in molten salt reactors, thorium breeding in fast reactors enhances their safety, and increases their conversion ratios. This point has not been lost on Indian reactor scientists who plan large scale production of thorium-uranium fast reactor breeding hybrids. Breeding thorium as a nuclear fuel in fast reactors would produce a large amount of fissionable U-233 that can be used as nuclear fuel in conventional reactors. This point has not been lost on Indian nuclear scientists, who plan to use the extra U-233 in Advanced Heavy Water Reactors. U-233 fueled non-breeder or converter Molten Salt Reactors offer attractive, safer and lower cost alternatives to conventional water cooled reactors, while reducing but not eliminating the nuclear waste problem. Thus, a modified Indian system could be developed, that would feature thorium breeding in IFRs, with U-233 burning MSRs. The rub for such a system would be that LFTRs would be cheaper to develop, cheaper to build, safer and cheaper to operate, and would virtually eliminate the nuclear waste problem.

The LFTR then is a thorium breeding MSR, that offers what may well be the simplest and best solution to the problem of producing sustainable nuclear power.

Joe Bonometti on LFTR design at the first Thorium Energy Alliance Conference

John Kutsch on a Thorium Energy future at Thorium Energy Alliance

Radon as harbinger of a cornucopia

Map of Natural Radioactivity in the United States
Joe Romm recently offered an interesting post on growing concerns about the environmental impact of fracking as a natural gas production method. I have been calling Joe's attention to the problem created by radioactive radon in the natural gas produced by fracking (hydrolic fracturing) of gas containing shale. There are dozens of radioactive waste cleanup sites in Texas, associated with the natural gas industry. The natural gas industry has largely kept the Texas radon problem largely hushed up. But elsewhere the problems are becoming increasingly well known.

A November 2009 story in Pro-Publica, titled Is New York’s Marcellus Shale Too Hot to Handle states,

The information comes from New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, which analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.

Not only is unsafe levels of radon coming up with water used in the fracking process, but it is also coming up with natural gas, and flowing into peoples homes through natural gas pipelines.According to the physics department of Idaho State University, Natural gas in the home is believed to produce an annual exposure of 9 mrem per year, while average home exposure to radiation from nuclear power plants is almost 100 times less dangerous. Amazingly, environmentalist who claim to be concerned about radiation problems related to nuclear power have ignored the radiation problems caused by natural gas, even though they are potentially far more deadly. Anti-nuclear organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace advocate putting more, rather than less highly radioactive natural gas into peoples homes, while opposing nuclear power which has been shown to pose far less radiation dangers than natural gas does, the New York state evidence suggests that natural gas produced by fraking may be much more dangerous than ordinary natural gas.

So where does the radon that seems to appear every time shalr rock formations are farked for natural gas, come from? According to a report from Commonwealth of Kentucky Geological Survey,

radioactive minreals uranium, radon, and thorium . . . occur in the black shale, which crops out in a horseshoe shape around central Kentucky, and in the phosphate deposits in the Lexington Limestone in central Kentucky.

The black shale is a marine, organic shale that contains many different kinds of minerals, including phosphates. The outcrop of the shale is extensive, and the high organic content makes the shale a good host for radioactive minerals. Uranium and thorium occur in the shale, and radon is a daughter product of the uranium in phosphates within the shale. The black shale also occurs in the subsurface in eastern and western Kentucky where it comes into contact with groundwater. In some areas of the state where there has been significant oil drilling, casing and pipes have become radioactively contaminated, which could cause secondary health hazards when humans come into contact with this drilling equipment.

So it is clear that the presence of radon indicates the presence of uranium and/or thorium, and since radon has no other natural source, finding a lot of radon, enough to be dangerous means that a lot of uranium and/or thorium must be around.

In situ mining is a very old technology. Copper has been mined in situ for at least 1000 years and quite possibly for 2000 years in China. In order to mine in situ. a leaching solution is pumped through resource baring permeable rocks. The resource mineral or minerals are dissolved in the leach solution and then pumped to the surface. Many uranium mines now use in situ leaching technologies as a means of uranium recovery.

From the viewpoint of energy investment, in situ mining has a big advantage over the pick and shovel type traditional mining. Yes I know, they don't use picks and shovels any more, but they still dig, and pull large amounts of material out of the earth. Digging and pulling material out of the ground, and then milling it, and disposing of the waste is energy intensive, especially when you are dealing with low grade ore. In situ mining, however, is not energy intense. Thus so called low grade ores can be mined by in situ mining without huge energy costs. There are of course challenges with approach. A major limitation to the in situ approach would seem to be that while there is a whole lot of uranium and thorium locked up in shale rock, shale is not permeable, and thus not currently seen as a candidate for in situ mining. That is where frarking comes in.

What a fracking does is to fracture shale and other rocks, that is to make them permeable. So it is possible to frake uranium/thorium baring shale, and then mine them in situ? Why not? We are not looking for a technological break through, just the wedding of two proven technologies. That looks like a slame dunk.

There is no reason why granite could not be also mined for minerals in sutu, and fracking has been used to mine granite already. Still, I suspect that a whole lot more research would be required on fracking granite before the fracking/in situ technology would be used, but the research hardly need take a long time, and fracking/in situ mining of granite can yield enormous amounts of Uranium and thorium plus many valuable metals and other minerals.

Among the common elements often found in shale in recoverable amounts are , vnadium, magnesium, copper, chromium, zinc, nickel, iron, aluminum and phosphorus.

if you would like to confirm the presence of Uranium and/or thorium an granite, there is a simple experiment that you could perform. Take a Geiger counter to a cemetery, and start checking granite tombstones for radiation. Some, although not all will show up as radioactive. The same thing will be true for granite in public building and countertops. In addition to thorium and uranium many granites contain recoverable amounts of Tantalum, Niobium. Titanium, Zirconium, Hafnium. and Yttrium, beryllium, and other rare earths. Clearly then the in situ mining of granites for actinides would yield a wealth of other mineral riches.

Let us now take a look at the big picture. The world Thorium and Uranium is for all practical purposes a sustainable energy resource. They can be mined from shale with very favorable energy return on energy Invested (EROEI). In addition to uranium and thorium a number of valuable minerals can be recovered in the same mining process with little to no further energy investment. Uranium and thorium recovery is also possible through in situ mining of some granite with a favorable EROEI. Many valuable minerals could also be recovered from the granite along with uranium and thorium with little to no further energy investment,

These findings are inconsistent with the neo-Malthusian view that we will soon run out of mineral resources. Indeed my conclusion is that the world can continue to supply abundant energy and material resources that will not be exhausted for as long as people live on it.

Children of the Club of Rome

Sarah Palin's story that Obama's health care legislation called for death panels to determine who would receive medical care, and who would simply be allowed to die in the new medical order, has rightly been described as the lie of the year for 2009. However, a recent post on the Oil Drum by Megan Quinn Bachman tells us that a form of death panels is emerging among people who believe that the Ehrlich/Forrester/Meadows/Club of Rome theory of global collapse of industrial civilization/resources/population . The post, titled "Leading the Way to a Low-Energy Future" describes what Bachman calls lifestyle leaders. Lifestyle leaders are people who are

building gardens, weatherizing their homes, getting rid of their cars, moving off-grid, bartering with neighbors and joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

According to Bachman these lifestyle leaders are pioneering the new order by forging a new set of careers appropriate to the new post civilization order:

I would argue that these people, the Children of the Club of Rome, are the death panels for hundreds of millions if not billions of people. Yet the Club of Rome model predicts a mass human die off:

Thus Bachman's lifestyle leaders are preparing for a Club of Rome apocalypse, which features mass human die off.
I am fond of Gail the Actuary (Gail E. Tverberg), an Oil Drum Editor who is associated with the "we are headed for collapse" point of view. i see Gail's work as having a positive aspect in that she and her guest posters repeatedly point to problems which are otherwise unvoiced. i do disagree with some assumptions and with the chain of argument which inevitably leads to negative conclusions about the future of a high population, materially wealthy civilization. I disagree with the view that the collapse of material civilization is inevitable. In addition I view the projected collapse of material civilization as an unmitigated catastrophe. This is what Chris Clugston suggests:

i disagree with this perspective because it assumes a far more limited future resource picture than I do. My viewpoint can be stated simply, we are not running out of energy, material resources, or food. A combination of two technologies, Hydraulic Fracturing (fracking), and in-situ leaching, offers the potential for high material resource recovery with favorable EROEI, from what was previously considered low grade ore. It is inevitable that the use of such recovery technologies will be applied to resource recovery, and the recovery of Uranium and thorium as part of the process will assure a favorable EROEI. Both fracking and in-situ leaching are highly tested technologies and thus appear to offer a path to a continuation of high energy/high material output civilization. Through the use of efficient and safe technologies like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, the population of earth can be assured of a high level of material prosperity for as long as there is likely to be people around.

Thus the future resource picture may not be nearly as bleak as Gail the Actuary and her associates would have us believe. Nor is the supposed mega-famine, which Paul Ehrlich, Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome have predicted, nearly as likely to occur, as they suggest. Ehrlich's famine predictions were thwarted by the so called "Green Revolution," which dramatically increased agricultural yields in countries like India.

A recent review of global agricultural resources, published in Science, titled "Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People." argues,

the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is used more efficiently and equitably. A multifaceted and linked global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security, . . ..

Thus in a high energy uranium/thorium based economy, the food supply is likely to be continue to be assured. The argument for the inevitable collapse of civilization can be falsified with some certainty, the impending image of mass death through the starvation of most people can be written off as a fantasy. Bachman's "lifestyle leaders"can be seen for what they are, a misanthropic death panel for the human race, whose lifestyle will turn against them as the population of earth continues to survive and increasingly prosper.