> While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is arguing the nastiness of plutonium.
Except everyone who knows anything about it. Plutonium is a hot topic because it's what you need to build a nuke, but the public perception that it is a significant as nuclear waste is simply completely misguided.
Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you. It oxidizes easily, and it's oxides are heavy and non-soluble, so when it is released to the environment, it just tends to fall down and stay there. There is negligible biological uptake through eating, and while there is some uptake through breathing, plutonium does not tend to stay airborne.
Various people have denounced environmental plutonium as something capable of killing billions. The toxicity of plutonium in humans is not known, simply because not enough people have died of it. There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body (and that's a long and horrible story), and there were a lot of people who worked coated in plutonium dust for a long time. Of the people who were injected with plutonium, most died of other causes. Suffice to say, plutonium is sufficiently non-radioactive that it's chemical toxicity is considered significant in it's lethality. Or, in other words, it's fine to consider toxicity of environmental plutonium as you would consider lead or other heavy metals.
To put it short, plutonium being toxic is simply not a concern as far as nuclear waste is concerned. If all the plutonium produced by civilian nuclear power was pulverized and spread in populated areas, it would not make nuclear reactors as dangerous to people as wind power. (Somewhat ironically, because of the thorium that is released into the environment while separating the REE for the magnets.) Taking all the plutonium produced in a plant and dumping it in one spot doesn't make that spot as dangerous as the ground near a typical fuel station that was in use for the period leaded gas was used.
Nuclear waste is really bad, but that's because of short-lived isotopes, which decay more often, and thus are more radioactive, and light radioactive materials, which are often soluble in water, have high biological uptake, and can stay in the atmosphere.
Plutonium needs to be tracked really closely, but that is not because it's toxic, it's because it can be used to make a bomb.
If everyone thought it was harmless, why wasn't it conducted on college students, the usual specimen of choice for harmless experiments? Was it just a coincidence that the researchers decided to experiment on the most powerless and defenseless subjects they could find?
This is MIT, not Mengele's Auschwitz. Radioactive tracers are injected into the blood streams of millions of people every year for PET and CT scans, of all ages, which is far more harmful than radioactive tracers in food.
That doesn't answer the question at all. It kinda just assumes that the question isn't really interesting because of course MIT isn't like Auschwitz, even in the instance where it kinda is.
You do know how scientific studies are run, right? I can't speak to why they chose to do the tests on developmentally disabled children (possibly wanted to test effects of radiation on growing metabolism or something, without risk of stunting the development of normal children, which is still unethical) but all of your suggestions sound like the perfect storm of uncontrollable factors and useless data.
As an MIT alum who (1) has run experiments, (2) has had experiments performed on me by MIT researchers and (3) has actually studied this particular case in a Scientific Ethics class at MIT, I know a lot of things. Plus my brother is developmentally disabled.
The "scientists" in question didn't think anyone would consent so they chose to experiment on people without seeking consent. They knew that normal adults would ask too many questions so they used cognitively impaired children. They did this because they didn't think of developmentally disabled people as fully human.
Look, MIT has already decided that this was a horribly unethical thing to do. Its professors practically scream that in classes. And it paid off the victims with $2million. MIT thinks this is unethical. So why are you disagreeing?
All three (four?) of your points are irrelevant since you literally suggested using publicly accessible breakfast cereal as a replacement for the equivalent of a controlled experiment.
Using developmentally disabled children for research BECAUSE they can't consent is a horrendous breach of basic human rights and not once did I disagree with you that it was unethical. I appreciate your argument but so far I've only been going after your rhetoric, which could be a lot more informative since you claim you studied this case.
you literally suggested using publicly accessible breakfast cereal as a replacement for the equivalent of a controlled experiment.
Perhaps I was unclear. I think they should have done the controlled experiment with university staff or students as subjects. If the experiment was really completely harmless, there's no reason not to. If they wanted to study the effects on growing children, they should have used ordinary schoolchildren whose parents consented.
As science, this was complete crap totally apart from the awful ethics. Many developmentally disabled people suffer from chromosomal abnormalities that lead to non-trivial physiological differences between them and the rest of the population, including metabolic and cardiac differences. That makes it extremely difficult to infer anything about effects on the general population from studies done on a small group of developmentally disabled people and that's why people with chromosomal abnormalities are often excluded from most research protocols. I think that you'd know all of this if you were familiar with science.
Probably they wanted subjects who would uncomplainingly eat a boring experimental diet.
And suggesting that MIT students be used for radioactivity experiments is silly: they would eat their own radioactive stuff to screw with the scientists.
I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent, and I don't see how discussing a particularly egregious case of what was presented could possibly be "completely irrelevant".
I think you are very confused. I've spent a lot of time with developmentally disabled people and I've yet to see one that didn't have a substantial cognitive impairment. Moreover, children in general cannot consent.
Christ, I used to live a block from Quaker's R&D facility in the Chicago suburbs. They never mentioned anything about radioactive research there. I bet there's all kinds of skeletons buried in the backyard. Oh wait, now there's a Gatorade workout field on top of it...
radioactive tracers do constitute radioactive material.
Stupd semantics.
Ypu can choose to have a CT scan, and good for you: the scandal here is that experiments were performed without the children or their parents having an opportunity to give informed consent.
The amount of radiation in those tracers was no more than 0.15µSv. That's five times less than what you get by eating six bananas a day.
And I highly doubt that there was no consent beforehand. Perhaps there was excessive legalese or the parents were not notified of the tracers, but that doesn't constitute the assumption that no consent was given.
The other thing about plutonium people fail to recognize is that practical uranium civilian power reactors are pretty lousy at producing plutonium. The proliferation risk is non-zero, but processing spent fuel is a pretty nasty business and the amount of plutonium there is so small as to be a big expense for the small yield.
The problem with plutonium is a properly designed military reactor can take the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices.
That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases, their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to even start an attempt.
If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build 50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.
There are several problems when it comes to gulf states for your anecdote.
The problem isn't a stable country like Saudi having the bomb, the problem is triggering an arms race. If Iran gets the bomb then what does that mean for Lebanon? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Hezbollah? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Syria?
If Iraq had the bomb in the 80s what would that have meant for the Iran/Iraq war, or the first Gulf war? Saddam Hussein may have felt that nuking Kuwait as part of a scorched earth policy would've been valid. After all, he used chemical weapons against Iran (and his own people).
I can't speak for asia but in the middle east nuclear bombs change the balance of power substantially.
North Korea seemly can use both Plutonium and Uranium (or something else entirely even).
South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.
North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet South Korea knows they won't use it...
Japan on the other hand, IS kinda paranoic, in the last elections a new party was formed, with a militaristic and nationalistic tone (including visiting WWII shrines and reacalling WWII as the good times), and they got expressive votes, also the current prime minister proposed heavily remilitarize Japan (to irritation of China, and both Koreas), including scratch the current constitution, and use a new one that follow confucionism (instead of illuminism).
>North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet South Korea knows they won't use it...
No. They have nukes because they have no chance whatsoever against the South. The North Korean army is bigger, but its equipment is antiquated, and it has no gas or live ammunition for training. The "soldiers" spend most of their time farming or working in factories. They don't have enough food to fight a war.
The South Korean military budget is 20x that of the North.
South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.
They might say that to their population, like they say that Kim Jung "Be Illing" shot a hole in one every time, but they don't really want the entire Korea, because they know they can never have the entire Korea.
Let's consider a scary scenario. Someone defects and shares with them all the knowledge, the blueprints, all the data related to handling and processing plutonium. How much closer would they be then to be considered dangerous. In other words is it just a matter of having information, or a matter of resources and money?
Resources and money for the most part. Also certain parts are simply hard to get ahold of, since they're export controlled, hard to produce and carefully watched. Knowledge alone is slowly becoming less and less of a barrier as time goes on and hasn't been so much of a serious mechanism to hold back a determined group with enough resources from doing some types of programs for awhile now.
It isn't that there aren't still dangerous secrets in the nuclear realm, but it's that the parts that are secret are more about how to make a really "good" bomb, or produce materially really efficiently. But the reality is that a group that doesn't really care about making good bombs or being particularly efficient isn't going to need as much secret knowledge as most people think.
To sum up, it really depends on what you mean by dangerous. They have nuclear weapons. That's pretty dangerous. But they don't have a large stockpile of well designed weapons, so no one is taking them too seriously and they're not what most people would consider a "nuclear power" because if they even tried to play with someone who was, they'd be so quickly outmatched they're extremely unlikely to do anything with them right now.
At least. So long as we live in an environment where if a nuclear bomb goes off, we're likely to know where it came from. The moment proliferation moves past that point is the moment we begin to have some real sticky issues and we are likely to have a problem.
In my mind, that's the scary scenario and it's why the world does a lot of work to limit the number of different parties that stores these types of weapons and has access to this type of technology.
North Korea will never use nukes against South Korea. They want a reunified Korea under Kim Jong Un. And the best way to do this without killing innocent people is to do what they've attempt countless times before.
Dig a tunnel under the DMZ and send people in to capture/assassinate the key people within the government.
North Korea will never use nukes against South Korea. They want a reunified Korea under Kim Jong Un. And the best way to do this without killing innocent people is to do what they've attempt countless times before.
Dig a tunnel under the DMZ and send people in to capture/assassinate the key people within the government.
Wow, you really believe that is the best way? Or is that the best way in the demented minds of the N. Korean leadership?
> To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback.
Assuming that there is a clear return address on any use of the weapon. How much time do you have to determine where to send the answering salvo? This argument made some kind of sense during the cold war, but it's dangerously naive if nearly everyone has a bomb and a long-range launch capability.
The first two devices that North Korea has tested are thought to have been Plutonium-based (the third is inconclusive). North Korea is known to have produced and reprocessed Pu at its Yongbyon complex.
Although the Little Boy design wasn't tested before use as it was a very conservative design, there have been quite a few tests of uranium based bombs - both implosion and gun type designs.
Partly because it was a conservative design, and partly because there just wasn't enough U-235 to build an extra bomb for testing. None of the U.S.'s three completely separate experimental enrichment processes were working that well, so they resorted to running them in series to get a result that was enriched enough to be used, which resulted in relatively low throughput.
The scientists and engineers ended up confident enough in the implosion design that Oppenheimer recommended to Groves that Little Boy be dismantled and the U-235 used to build two or three implosion bombs instead.
While procrastinating for an exam a while back, I decided to read up on the Chernobyl accident. It always remembered it as a horrible accident (which it was), significantly due to the errors involved, and the massive impact it had on the victims involved.
If I read your post correctly, it should not be attributed to plutonium. Would you mind elaborating on what kind of radioactive fumes/waste this could've been?
While the number of victims may be high, the number of casualties is impossible to determine: could range from 50s to 200,000s. In either case, I assume this is due to other radioactive waste (airborne?), or am I mistaken?
I too went down the Chernobyl history rabbit hole during so-called study. It's absolutely incredible. The big thing that gets me (which seems to happen at work in rather less cataclysmic style, and in every industry all the time) is the way that every misstep was followed by those involved making the worst possible decision. Then the next thing done compounds the earlier events - often with the chain of events occurring over months. Why do people universally do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, and miss every opportunity for course correction?
I think the people operating complex systems are regularly making mistakes and then correcting them. When mistakes are recovered, the issue never becomes a problem, and there is no postmortem to come to our attention. It's only the cases where mistakes are made repeatedly over a long period, and the outcome is horrific, that the incident comes to our attention. It's a form of selection bias.
It also depends on the fundamental resilience of the system, whether or not single failures compound, whether or not the fail-safes themselves have failures or faults within them, and how personnel (and management) respond in the event of failure.
Known, simple, redundant, and stable systems which tend to return to modes of stability, which don't tend to experience runaway failure modes, and whose staffs are trained in known (and unknown) failure modes, tend to work well.
Unknown designs (they or staff are new, they're poorly documented, they're acquired from vendors or through organizational acquisition, etc.), whose staff aren't trained in normal and abnormal operations, which do tend to go into runaway failure modes, whose safety or management systems themselves have (known or unknown) bugs, etc., all tend to compound failure modes.
I've had direct experience of this at several levels myself. More frighteningly, I've interviewed senior management of a nuclear facility who candidly admitted that it was poorly managed.
Realize that a 4GW nuclear power plant is producing about $360,000 worth of retail electricity ($0.09/kWh) per hour, and that downtime costs over a million dollars every three hours. Keeping that plant online and operational has a very high priority -- sometimes to the point of cutting corners to do so if short-term objectives may be met at the cost of long-term sustainability.
In aviation, we call that the "swiss cheese model". There are holes distributed within it, and accidents happen when all the holes are aligned.
The corollary is that you must fix the holes as soon as you find them, so they won't all align in your path. And you do find the problems before a disaster, but people don't like to fix things.
Some people do, but most are worried they'll be blamed for either the fact that the problem exists in the first place (complainers, criticizers), for rocking the boat (whistleblowers, trouble-makers), or for fixing it wrong (stupid, careless). Our system, or many, for that matter, isn't set up to reward people who find and fix holes.
That all said, there are exceptions. But pettiness and self-centeredness can so often wreck it, or at least deter people from being bold enough to face judgment or possible error in order to do the right thing.
If you liked "How Complex Systems Fail", you may be interested in "Normal Accidents" [1]. It's basically the long-form complete version of the paper you mentioned and packed with interesting examples.
Part of it is selection bias -- if they hadn't done the stupidest possible thing all the time, then maybe there wouldn't have been a disaster for you to read about.
(I don't think this is a sufficient explanation, but I do think it's part of the explanation.)
Highly active fission products - things like Iodine-131 and Caesium-137, but fissioning Uranium creates a large grab-bag of different fission products with very different half-lives and decay types.
IIRC, the risks from Chernobyl were mainly from iodine-131, strontium-90, and cesium-137.
Iodine-131 has strong uptake into the body, concentrates in the thyroid gland, and is highly radioactive. It is bad news.
Strontium-90 is well absorbed by humans, becomes locked in the bones, and has a half-life of decades. It is a significant long term problem.
Cesium-137 also has a decade-ish half-life and some body uptake. The main issue with it is that reactors produce large amounts. If it was a trace product it could be ignored.
This is an excellent and insightful comment. One quick note: it's and its are different words. I count ten occurrences of "it's", four of which should be "its":
it's what you need [correct in original]
its half-life
it's only mildly radioactive [correct in original]
It's an alpha emitter [correct in original]
its oxides
its lethality
its *chemical toxicity*
it's fine [correct in original]
it's toxic, it's because [correct in original]
It's also impossible to track all the exposures that lead to cancer that then killed the person. A "benign" form of radiation is a hard sell these days - I'm not buying it.
How is wind power dangerous to people? Because the production of wind wheels pollutes the environment? Or it diverts thunderstorms?
Maybe people die in the construction of the turbines? But then, wouldn't people die in mining Plutonium and constructing nuclear power plants? Somehow my faith into that kind of number juggling to make nuclear power look good has not yet been 100% established.
Apparently about a dozen people a year are killed installing or maintaining wind turbines, however the post in question was referring to byproducts of refining the rare earths ultimately used for the magnets in the generators.
(getting off topic here...) That pdf seems to be missing one crucial piece of information: the total number of turbines installed per year (or I can't find it). A 16x increase in (documented) accidents (not all of which are of equal threat) over 16 years does sound pretty dire and damning, unless the rate of installations has been growing at a larger rate. Do you know of any resource that provides that? I can only find megawatt rate of growth (which is a useful metric too, but not as usefully comparable since the events in this pdf seem to be primarily related to installations, not the output of the installations).
Nothing is going to be completely safe. It's valuable to get accidents and events as close to zero as possible, but I suspect that's being done by increasing the denominator rather than reducing the numerator.
Yeah, the PDF is not well written. I can't even tell if it means worldwide, or just in the UK. But it is probably accurate to an order of magnitude or so.
In looking this up, I was struck by the avoidance of data that just says X people die annually by electrocution (of any kind), although I freely admit that perhaps my search terms were faulty. Maybe it was that time I was almost died by electrocution.
Are nuclear power plants still being built at the same rate as wind turbines? Or are they mostly old ones sitting around? I suspect the latter, in which case the "accidents in construction" comparison doesn't make much sense imo.
Interesting point about the rare earths.
Btw, for people out there who know nothing apart from the media gibberish on nuclear energy, the ongoing nuclear energy course by Larry Foulke on Coursera is a good place to start to better under all aspects of nuclear reactors and radioactivity.
> Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you
"if inhaled or digested, however, plutonium's effects due to radioactivity overwhelm the effects of plutonium's chemical interactions with the body, and the LD50 dose drops to the order of 5ug/kg"
That basically makes it one of the most toxic substances that we know of.
Where does this information come from ? Wikipedia has much lower toxicity figures :
> Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results, such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium.[91] "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."[96][97]
Not that I expect wikipedia to be very trustworthy on contentious issues, but still, the references do seem to lead to relatively non-political websites.
I'm super-interested in thorium reactor research, but this author seems to lack even a cursory understanding of the issues at play. This reactor differs from what lots of thorium advocates are aiming for because it's a solid-fueled, high-pressure, water-cooled reactor, instead of the proposed LFTR designs, which involve a reaction taking place in a liquid at very high temperature, but at atmospheric pressure, and thus have a different set of tradeoffs as far as efficiency, safety, proliferation resistance, etc.
This article discusses none of that, and instead suggests that this reactor is sub-optimal because it's not a cold fusion reactor -- what? Thorium atoms are big and somewhat-unstable, which is what you want for fission. For fusion, you want little atoms you can ram together to make slightly-bigger little atoms. They're totally separate.
In order to make Thorium successful you have to consider the consequences. The Nuclear Power industy has been under attack now significantly longer than it was "the next big thing" (during the 50's it was 'cool' and starting in the mid-sixties on it has been 'un-cool') Long enough that all it knows is 'attack.' If someone says "This will make all our Nuclear reactors obsolete!" it makes Thorium an enemy that must be killed. But if you say "This works with your existing reactor and the spent rods are more easily disposed." Then its a 'friend' of the industry. So making fuel rods with Thorium that are compatible with existing designs is a Big Deal(tm).
Unfortunately the type of reactor they are building is not as safe as a LFTR, nor does the fuel in this type of reactor last as long; the LFTR reactor is a type of fast breeder reactor. It will still need to be fed pellets continually. The only two material difference between this kind of reactor and a normal boiling water reactor is that it is capable of "burning" a small amount of uranium and/or plutonium a year (either from spent fuel or new sources), and the spent fuel is far less radioactive after a full burn (a full burn is not always the case). It still has most of the other safety issues of a boiling water reactor.
I'm pretty sure they have not actually built any new reactor this time around. AFIK they are testing in the Halden reactor[1][2] from the late 50s. It's one of only two reactors in the country, both used mainly for research and testing, so the pellets feeding issue you mention is a feature not a bug :)
Just a nitpick, the LFTR isn't a fast reactor, though it is a breeder. Thermal reactors breed thorium to U233 just fine. Some people have proposed fast molten salt reactors but those designs aren't as far along.
Furthermore, isn't Th no better than U-238 for fast-reactors (and we have huge quantities of U-238)?
Also, isn't the neutron economy of LFTR just slightly above unity? IIRC chemical removal of fission byproducts was needed for a feasible Th reactor that generates excess U-233. At least that was my recollection that one of the potential advantages of the FLiBe design was for such very simple chemical reprocessing.
True, they have similar advantages, very efficient fuel utilization and little waste.
Some of the engineers involved in molten salt reactors say "come for the thorium, stay for the reactor." Liquid fuels offer several benefits. Removing fission products continuously helps you achieve high burnup. There's no fuel fabrication cost. And if the electricity cuts off, a frozen plug melts and all the fuel dumps into a passive cooling tank, with little worry about decay heat since you've been removing those fission products.
The neutron economy is arguably an advantage from a proliferation perspective, since you can't remove much fissile without the reactor shutting down.
Still, a good fast reactor like the IFR has its own charms. The metal fuel is easy to fabricate on-site, and they tested electricity cutoff and it quietly shut down just fine, due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. And the mixed plutonium isotopes produced by the reactor are very difficult to refine into weapons-grade.
One advantage of the molten salt reactor is that there's nothing in the reactor that can drive any kind of chemical explosion, like the hydrogen that blew at Fukushima. The IFR uses molten sodium, which is pretty reactive with air and water. That might not be too terrible to deal with but it does drive up the cost.
Another advantage of the IFR though is that we've got a production-ready design ready to go.
You're right, I know very little about nuclear reactors. (I'm the author.) Enough to get by, but not enough to be an authority on every variety of them.
Hopefully enough to write an interesting story, though :)
Why write a story about something you don't understand? I don't want to sound too critical, but you do a disservice to this technology and the people involved if you don't get the facts straight.
I think you did a reasonable job, but the add-in about cold fusion didn't make any sense and really affected the seriousness of the article. It calls into question whether anything else in the piece is valid or not.
There are tons of people here that have expertise in these fields. Some of them are commenting on this very page. Why not develop relationships with people that can provide domain expertise as needed for stories like this, rather than trying to wing it?
I'd love to do that! But it's just not feasible for me, when I'm writing multiple stories a day, about very disparate topics. If it was a feature about thorium power, and I had a chance to do my research, it'd be a different story :)
(I do have quite a few expert friends who I lean on for domain expertise, but as luck would have it, my nuclear guy wasn't online when I wrote this.)
Considering Norway is already a net exporter of both oil and hydroelectric power, if they add cutting-edge nuclear to the portfolio, they will really be all-around energy kingpins!
(And yes, just in case you were wondering, the element thorium really is named after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. And yes, Norse mythology originated from Norway, where Thor Energy is based. Coincidence, I think not!)
Morten Thrane Esmark found a black mineral on Løvøya island, Norway and gave a sample to his father Jens Esmark, a noted mineralogist. The elder Esmark was not able to identify it and sent a sample to Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius for examination in 1828. Berzelius determined that it contained a new element, which he named thorium after Thor, the Norse god of thunder.[17] He published his findings in 1829.[50][51][52]
The fact that Thor Energy is Norwegian might just be due to the country being at the same time very wealthy and environment-minded. The Norwegian reserves of thorium are far smaller than those of other countries.
> The fact that Thor Energy is Norwegian might just be due to the country being at the same time very wealthy and environment-minded. The Norwegian reserves of thorium are far smaller than those of other countries.
Norway is also only nr. 22 when it comes to proven oil reserves :) (dunno about previous figures)
From the (few, probably inaccurate) estimates, Norway seems to have a sizeable enough amount of thorium for a country of its size and population.
"but not in the sense that most people think of when they hear the word thorium [...] they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium reactor"
What is this supposed to mean? Who ever talked about cold fusion thorium reactor? Was the author thinking about toroidal fields in Tokamak (which is very hot fusion)??
Keep in mind, this article was written by the same author as "Cold Fusion reactor independently verified"[1]. He seems somewhat obsessed with the idea.
The THTR-300 ran into trouble because of operational difficulties with its unconventional pebble-bed design. In contrast, this is a very conventional reactor design. The difference is that the fuel is initially made of about 90% ThO2 and 10% PuO2.
This is interesting and encouraging stuff. I'm a big believer in fission power as our best option for a clean source of huge amounts of electricity (which we'll only need more of as electric cars start to become popular).
My main reason for commenting is to congratulate Thor Energy on coming up with a trebly relevant name.
There was an enegry debate here a couple of months ago and it was suggested that the future of enegry is everyone will have a solar panels and a battery which is charged by the sun.
Once you think about distributed power, the need to generate mass amounts in one place seems to be less important, though having access to cleaner and safer ways of doing so are still good things as no doubtsome of us will still rely on the grid sometimes.
Give us decent batteries and all will be well. My parents just scrapped their solar set up. Summer days in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, provides enough sun to have the charging switch off at about 9am, batteries full. Big Mac Pro, lots of IT gear, coffee machine, vacuum cleaner etc all used normally. No problem. But come winter the batteries would be perilously low, risking damage. Days and days of torrential rain prevented any meaningful charging. The ability to store more power economically would be so very handy. The panels would provide vastly more power than was used during a year, but were uneconomic due to not being able to feed it back to the grid (!!?!) and not being able to store enough. I'd say that decent power storage was a bigger problem than the generation.
is it possible to somehow convert the power gathered during summer and spread it out for use during winter (when there is less sun), by say, electrolysing water to produce hydrogen and then use that as a chemical store of fuel?
if you could feed it to the grid, hydro and coal and natural plants could be throttled down or some units shut down. I don't know about nz energy mix but I assume they have lots of hydro power. This is the natural straight forward way if doing it, not installing heavy batteries at homes. You can simulate adding different power sources to the grid with commercial software.
I'm sick and tired of this "but it's intermittent" canard.
Distributed power may work in sparsely populated areas, but urban areas have a too high population density for that to work. That is even the case for whole countries, like Germany, where all the available renewable energy resources amounts to no more that 25 % of the current energy uses. That number is even unrealistically high, requiring to cover almost any available surface with solar panels and all usable spots with wind turbines etc.
Thus in such areas, a centralized grid is needed to transport electricity from where it is available to where it can be used. This can be nuclear, but it can also be renewable energy, e.g solar energy from southern Spain and Sahara or wind power from Norway in the case of Germany, but to produce everything locally won't work a lot of places.
Solar (and Wind) power both are not good base load power solutions - primarily because battery tech to store power for long periods isn't practical yet, and due to their cyclical availability.
Also to note - the framework to transfer/sell power from an area of excess to another (i.e., P2P power supply) is nonexistent, let alone trying to merge that with centralized power (for right now, you can only really sell your power to the utility - and they don't like it because it costs a lot for them to manage it).
Solar/Wind are very very important to a diverse and strong power mix (and for low stable energy prices), but combined with fission (or fusion once it's feasible) or other traditional power sources, you get a lot more stability and predictable power generation.
At least pebble bed reactors (like the already mentioned THTR-300) are not really safe. Get a bit of water into the primary cooling cycle, while the reactor is running at capacity and you won't have that power plant for long (happened at the AVR.. luckily it was running at lower temperature at the time so they only had to run the reactor quite a lot reduced capacity for a year to get the water out).
As for molten salt reactors.. still lots of problems to be solved related to the combination of molten salt and high temperature (I recall there being an US based molten salt reactor that got it's cooling cycle contaminated somehow.. but can't seem to find it right now)
No one with even a rudimentary understanding of exponential growth believes energy consumption can grow exponentially forever. But the problem is self-fixing; one day, the supply of energy will stop growing as fast as demand. The day will come, the day will pass, and the world will adjust.
In particular, prices will rise gradually over time, which will encourage investment in cost-lowering research and development, as well as into energy generation.
The market is what helps the world adjust. Unless a dramatic event causes a significant change in prices in a short time, things will carry on just like they always have.
What are you proposing is the problem? That we will foolishly bull forwards, and accidentally violate the laws of physics and consume more energy than there is?
the fear is that we would consume too much now, and not leave enough behind to facilitate the research/development needed to find/create better sources of energy.
E.g., you used up the fuel in the car too fast, and can't reach the next gas station.
I'm sure in 2400 years we'll have a Mr Fusion™ that we can chuck galaxies into for our home energy needs, so there's really no need for this kind of cynical hysteria.
This is probably rather pointless - first normalize the energy consumption by the population. Because population growth was exponential for a long time, the energy consumption per capita was probably more or less constant. It will get very crowded way before our energy consumption starts to melt the earth.
The "not prone to nuclear weapons proliferation" bit is critical, and unfortunately wrong. As http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-w... points out, thorium produces protactinium-233 which can be chemically separated out. In around a month that turns into uranium-233 at sufficient purity to make nuclear bombs.
This process is much easier to do in secret than the centrifuges that are required to separate isotopes of uranium. Thus thorium is worse for proliferation, not better.
Yes, but you have to separate the protactinium shortly after it's created, or you end up with enough U232 to make a bomb impractical. And in a solid-fuel reactor, what are you going to do, shut down the reactor every day so you can melt the fuel rods, pull out the protactinium, and refabricate them?
A liquid-fueled reactor could be another matter, and we'd want to keep an eye on them in non-nuclear states. But another factor is the breeding ratio, which is barely over one for thermal thorium. If someone were to pull out much fissile, the reactor would shut down, and they'd have to go begging for more fissile to start it up again.
Another advantage for liquid fuel is very high burnup, so pretty much all you're taking out of the reactor is fission products, not leftover fissile that could theoretically be reprocessed.
At a test site in Norway, Thor Energy has successfully created a thorium nuclear reactor — but not in the sense that most people think of when they hear the word thorium. The Norwegians haven’t solved the energy crisis and global warming in one fell swoop — they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium reactor.
Who the hell thinks "cold fusion" when they hear thorium?
The key thing here is that these pellets are designed to work with existing reactors. If you want to start using thorium it is a very hard sell (given the popularity of nuclear power atm) to build new reactors/plants, but changing the fuel in existing plants to something that can be said to be 'cleaner' or 'safer' might be doable.
The rod in the middle of the picture contains thorium-MOX pellets, and is being inserted into the reactor (which is underground).
So these guys are standing right next to a fuel rod radioactive enough to start a nuclear chain reaction? [0] Can anybody elaborate on how dangerous this is?
[0] only if close to lots of other fuel rods, I guess...
Unused nuclear fuel has very low radioactivity. It is the fission products, which are the problem regarding radioactivity. Were it a used fuel bundle, they wouldn't be standing there.
Wait a minute...plutonium is a waste product? I thought the supply of plutonium (that is not used in weapons) was running so low there would not be enough to fuel deep space missions.
The isotope of plutonium that's used in radiothermal generators for space missions, Pu-238, is something you produce specially. Usually you get Np-237 from spent reactor fuel, and then bombard it with neutrons in a reactor designed for producing useful isotopes.
Plutonium is manufactured in a reactor, not processed from ore. The dominant source for plutonium for deep space missions was the US government, and they dominant reason for producing it was bombs.
However, the US govt. doesn't need to produce bombs anymore - they've done enough work to know how to extend the life of the bombs they do have, as well as how to go about reprocessing the plutonium in warheads that are too old into new ones (I think). They are reducing the number of warheads in service, so the US has shut down domestic production.
The Russians seem to have caught up to the US in the warhead lifespan tech and they seem to have shut down their breeders too?
Yes I know that India is working hard in making thorium reactors. Also, many of the nuclear plants in India use some percentage of thorium like 4 thorium with 12 uranium to make a bundle. I hope thorium reactors soon. It will be very useful.
Except everyone who knows anything about it. Plutonium is a hot topic because it's what you need to build a nuke, but the public perception that it is a significant as nuclear waste is simply completely misguided.
Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you. It oxidizes easily, and it's oxides are heavy and non-soluble, so when it is released to the environment, it just tends to fall down and stay there. There is negligible biological uptake through eating, and while there is some uptake through breathing, plutonium does not tend to stay airborne.
Various people have denounced environmental plutonium as something capable of killing billions. The toxicity of plutonium in humans is not known, simply because not enough people have died of it. There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body (and that's a long and horrible story), and there were a lot of people who worked coated in plutonium dust for a long time. Of the people who were injected with plutonium, most died of other causes. Suffice to say, plutonium is sufficiently non-radioactive that it's chemical toxicity is considered significant in it's lethality. Or, in other words, it's fine to consider toxicity of environmental plutonium as you would consider lead or other heavy metals.
To put it short, plutonium being toxic is simply not a concern as far as nuclear waste is concerned. If all the plutonium produced by civilian nuclear power was pulverized and spread in populated areas, it would not make nuclear reactors as dangerous to people as wind power. (Somewhat ironically, because of the thorium that is released into the environment while separating the REE for the magnets.) Taking all the plutonium produced in a plant and dumping it in one spot doesn't make that spot as dangerous as the ground near a typical fuel station that was in use for the period leaded gas was used.
Nuclear waste is really bad, but that's because of short-lived isotopes, which decay more often, and thus are more radioactive, and light radioactive materials, which are often soluble in water, have high biological uptake, and can stay in the atmosphere.
Plutonium needs to be tracked really closely, but that is not because it's toxic, it's because it can be used to make a bomb.
The more you know.