Green Nuclear Power
With two nuclear crises threatening world peace at the moment, it is time to look seriously at the history of nuclear power. What is the real value of medical nuclear research which Iran claims it needs. Could it be done with safe nuclear reactors ?
This was written around the time I spoke to someone connected to the Thorium Energy Alliance, probably back in 2013 or thereabouts, the interview has been lost after The Prisma was hacked, but the science hasn’t changed.
These are useful links
https://thoriumenergyalliance.com/product/superfuel-thorium-the-green-energy-source-for-the-future/
https://www.wagingpeace.org/history/contact-us/
It may come as a surprise to hear that there is a safe form of nuclear power generation and it has been known since the possibilities of nuclear energy were first exploited during World War 2. But back in 1944 Roosevelt and Churchill signed an agreement that they would do all they could to secure the available supplies of Uranium and Thorium ores. And despite the fact that the element Thorium was known from the beginning to be a suitable fuel for power generation it was abandoned in favour of Uranium.
In Richard Martin’s book Super Fuel (2012) he says that although it is not accurate to say that Thorium was abandoned because it could not produce weapons-grade Plutonium, still it is clear that in the rush to develop nuclear energy in the US Uranium was considered to be a better understood technology, and the military characters in charge of the projects were so determined to develop it as quickly as possible that their minds were closed to the alternatives. And closed also to the obvious risks of Uranium reactors.
It is useful to summarize the advantages that are claimed for Thorium as a fuel:
Thorium ores are cheaper and more widely distributed than Uranium ores.
A Th reactor produces less than 1% of radioactive waste compared to conventional U reactors, and the waste it does produce is safe after as little as 10 years compared to thousands.
These factors apply to all Th reactors, but the so-called Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) design has three other important advantages:
It cannot suffer a melt-down – if its temperature does increase, a plug at the bottom melts and the core material collects harmlessly in a storage vessel.
A liquid fuel reactor is not pressurized like current designs, meaning that there is no risk of explosion due to over-heating.
It can also burn Plutonium as a fuel thus eliminating the problem of safe storage of this dangerous waste product of Uranium reactors.
In case this sounds like the work of utopian idealists it is worth pointing out that the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was set up in 1943 to develop nuclear technology for the US Govt., has published a paper Th-ING: A sustainable Energy Source, describing the processes involved and pointing out that the US has has over 3,000 tons of Thorium Nitrate at a secure site, still awaiting disposal due to the high cost involved, about USD 60 million. The main subject of the article is to explain the ING: that Thorium is Now Green. Due to new chemical techniques developed at Los Alamos, it is now possible to process Thorium ores much more cheaply and efficiently than before, using procedures that are far safer environmentally.
The LFTR procedure was developed way back in the 1950s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, under Alvin Weinberg, who dedicate much of his time to warning of the dangers of meltdowns in Uranium Light Water Reactors, which have become the most common design worldwide.