5333 private links
22 December 2022
Inspection and certification company Bureau Veritas (BV) recently signed an agreement with nuclear power technology developer ThorCon for the Technology Qualification and subsequent development of a 500MW molten salt nuclear power barge intended for operations in Indonesia. Thorcon has been promoting its technology to key Indonesian institutions since 2015, the year that, Indonesia decided to cancel its $8bn plans to construct four nuclear plants with a total capacity of 6GWe by 2025.
In 2014, Thorcon’s parent company Florida-based Martingale, completed the preliminary detailed design of its molten salt reactor, technical details of which were published at thorconpower.com “It is the basis for securing feedback, funding, and siting for the project,” it said, adding that “the goal for 2015 is to identify a host country and site for construction of the non-nuclear prototype ThorCon, along with funding to enable construction”. In January 2015 Martingale formally unveiled its ThorCon liquid-fuel nuclear reactor design, which uses uranium and thorium fuel dissolved in molten salt, and these same details are now available on the Thorcon website. At that time, production was expected to start by 2020.
Q: Can thorium end the energy crisis?
Asked 11 years, 8 months ago
It seems that, as of lately thorium is steadily increasing in popularity, as an alternative to traditional nuclear fuels. Here's Mr. Kirk Sorensen in a TED video advocating the use of thorium. Thorium even has a nice, green website, among other resources expounding on how awesome it is.
The general picture projected by thorium advocates is that it is very much like a silver bullet for the energy crisis. This sounds wonderful, but also too good to be true. If it's as good as they say, how come thorium reactors are not common ? Surely it has disadvantages as well ?
A:
A short summary of what I understand are the key points in Kirk Sorenson's presentations. He is very good at providing sources for all his claims, so I won't repeat most of them here.
Nuclear power is essential for reducing pollution, including atmospheric CO2. This is based on its energy density (up to 6 orders of magnitude).[1]
Thorium is far more plentiful than uranium[2], and does not need to be enriched to be used as a nuclear fuel. Thorium is not fissile like Uranium-235, but it is fertile: if it is exposed to neutrons it becomes fissile in the form of U-233.
A Molten Salt Reactor, like the one demonstrated at Oak Ridge in the late 1960s, is inherently safe, and more efficient than Pressurized Water Reactors.
With a source of cheap and plentiful electricity, we could synthesize fuel usable in conventional vehicles at reasonable cost (comparable to or cheaper than present prices). These fuels would be nearly carbon-neutral because they would be synthesized using atmospheric CO2. Dimethyl ether is one suggestion as a direct substitute for diesel fuel.
Based on those points, Thorium is a very good candidate to end the "artificial energy crisis". [3]
Suggested resources:
- http://www.thoriumenergycheaperthancoal.com/
- http://www.daretothink.org/how-big-is-that-thorium-ball/
- http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/lets-produce-a-gwye/
[3] http://www.daretothink.org/shortest-intro-to-molten-salt-the-thorium-reactor/
To boldly consider a future with clean energy for all
Cheap energy is essential for human prosperity. Always has been. Molten salt reactors have the potential to deliver the cheap, clean and safe energy that is needed to lift billions of people out of energy poverty, without endangering the climate. //
In 2007, Google took up an ambitious plan. Google believed that the most effective way to terminate the use of fossil fuels is by outcompeting them. Google’s RE<C plan was targeted at developing strategies to achieve this goal. After investing $850 million, Google terminated the program because it failed. In their article ‘Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?’ RE<C project leaders Ross Koningstein and David Fork explain why they are convinced we need new technologies to outcompete coal. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
Placing all eggs in the basket of wind and solar increases the chances of a sustained victory of today’s big winner: fossil fuel.
It looks like we have to choose between lowering CO2-levels and improving social justice.
Unless we take a fresh look at present developments in nuclear. Over the last decade, molten salt reactors have become the focal point of a quickly growing number of business startups, researchers, and investors, supported by an also quickly growing number of supporters. Even though they presently only exist on paper, molten salt reactors have managed to create the first pro-nuclear grassroots movement since the early sixties.
The enthousiasm can be easily explained: molten salt reactors have the potential to produce cheap, abundant, safe and clean power. Some companies claim this can be done starting in 2021.
The key to the MSR’s techological advantages the liquid fuel. This technique makes it possible to take sixty to hundred times more energy out of the same amount of fuel. This brings the radical new perspective of cheap, clean, safe and abundant energy for all of us.
In nuclear reactors as we know them, the fuel is solid. Present day reactors are engineered to be safe, and they are: even if we take accidents like Fukushima into account, nuclear reactors are by far the safest means of producing energy. But in many European countries, there is a strong but unfounded fear of radioactivity. Opponents have kept the industry in a stalemate for about forty years, leading to a virtually halted development.
Sorensen has remained firmly convinced that his thorium reactor, fully named liquid fluoride thorium reactor, is short lftr (pronounced ‘lifter’), is the ultimate in clean, safe and abundant energy. //
A lftr in its full form will be a superb energy machine. This machine can burns thorium and may do so with 99% efficiency. This means a lftr-powered electricity plant will deliver a year of electricity for a western city of a million, with one single tonne (1000kgs) thorium. The resulting ‘waste’ can be worked up as precious (rare earth) metals or can simply be stored for about 500 years – nothing compared to a regular nuclear power plant. The Earth has plenty of thorium, enough to last us for tens of thousands of years.
This thorium reactor is very safe: the core consists of a vessel of a molten salt mixture at high temperature (650C) at nearly atmospheric pressure. There’s simply nothing that can explode, and the smart design makes sure that if anything goes wrong, the machine shuts itself down without human interference. In case of any malfunction, the hot melt drains away safely into passively cooled drainage tanks.
2020 Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang voiced support of Advanced Nuclear, specifically for development of Thorium Molten-Salt Reactors.
Andrew Yang and Cory Booker's statements regarding regarding nuclear power remain true, and are still worth considering.
Now would be a great time for Senator Bernie Sanders to acknowledge that closing Vermont Yankee nuclear plant increased emissions.
Most people are unaware Nuclear Power is low-carbon... even lower than solar power. Nuclear power is incredibly low-carbon. Nuclear power is America's single largest source of low-carbon electricity. It is not even close.
In 2020, misleading "fact-checks" were created by some strongly anti-nuclear organizations. Because any candidate taking a pro-nuclear stance can expect to receive failling grades on the environment from anti-nuclear organizations such as Greanpeace, it is worth inspecting what a 2020 "fact-check" looked like, when it comes to Thorium Molten-Salt Reactors.
Scientists are excited about an experimental nuclear reactor using thorium as fuel, which is about to begin tests in China. Although this radioactive element has been trialled in reactors before, experts say that China is the first to have a shot at commercializing the technology.
The reactor is unusual in that it has molten salts circulating inside it instead of water. It has the potential to produce nuclear energy that is relatively safe and cheap, while also generating a much smaller amount of very long-lived radioactive waste than conventional reactors.
Construction of the experimental thorium reactor in Wuwei, on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert, was due to be completed by the end of August — with trial runs scheduled for this month, according to the government of Gansu province. //
When China switches on its experimental reactor, it will be the first molten-salt reactor operating since 1969, when US researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee shut theirs down. And it will be the first molten-salt reactor to be fuelled by thorium. Researchers who have collaborated with SINAP say the Chinese design copies that of Oak Ridge, but improves on it by calling on decades of innovation in manufacturing, materials and instrumentation.
Molten Salt Reactor and origins
Over the last decade, Michael and his colleagues have constructed a new paradigm that views prosperity, cheap energy and nuclear power as the keys to environmental progress. A book he co-wrote (with Ted Nordhaus) in 2007, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism
to the Politics of Possibility, was called by Wired magazine “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,” while Time Magazine called him a “hero of the environment.”
History
Two-Fluid MSBR Core Designs
One-Fluid MSBR Chemical Processing
One-Fluid MSBR Core Designs
Denatured MSR Design Efforts
Molten salt mixtures were imagined for use in nuclear reactors by Eugene Wigner during the Manhattan Project. Successful use of uranium hexafluoride in the K-25 gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment facility near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, built confidence in the use of uranium in fluoride form, and in 1950 a mixture of fluoride salts in liquid form was proposed to solve some of the issues associated with the Aircraft Nuclear Program. A small, proof-of-principle liquid-fluoride reactor was built and operated in 1954 at Oak Ridge, and two years later under the encouragement of laboratory director Alvin Weinberg, a more significant examination began of liquid-fluoride reactors for electrical generation at terrestrial power stations. Weinberg also encouraged the examination of the thorium fuel cycle implemented in liquid fluoride reactors, and this work led to the construction and operation of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) at Oak Ridge. The MSRE operated from 1965 to 1969, when it was shut down under the orders of Milton Shaw of the Atomic Energy Commission so as to free up additional funding for the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) program. The molten-salt program continued for another three years at Oak Ridge until it was cancelled in 1972 under Shaw’s orders.
ThorCon is a thermal spectrum, graphite moderated, molten fluoride fuel salt reactor. ThorCon implements a fully passive approach for Control (reactivity excursions and physics-based passive shutdown), Cool (decay heat removal) and Contain (radioactive material containment) to safely and economically handle possible casualty scenarios. As the molten fluoride fuel salt circulates, it continuously evolves as transmutations, fission product generation, structural material constituents dissolution, salt ingress into graphite pores, off-gassing, precipitation of insoluble species, temperature cycling, etc., occur. ThorCon fuel’s performance is, therefore, a function its current nuclear, chemical, and physical properties and fortunately, dynamic chemical equilibrium is achieved rapidly due to the high operating temperature effect on the kinetic processes. An adequate database of fuel salt property variances with temperature and composition is highly desirable. Measurements of fuel salt properties via sensors, even noncontinuous, will provide near real-time information on the physical and chemical state of the working fluid. Demonstration of the bounding values of the fluoride salt chemistry to include fission product solubility limits and purified salt acceptable impurity levels, facilitates reactor design for safe and economic operations. Similarly, measurements of the fuel salt oxidation state (represented in the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment as the ratio of U+4 to U+3 ions); and heat transfer parameters such viscosity, density, thermal conductivity, and heat capacity, and their rates of change (temperature and composition) are coveted.
October 8, 2018, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the operation of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) using uranium-233 as a fuel. U-233 does not occur naturally; it is formed when thorium absorbs a neutron undergoes a double beta decay to form U-233. U-233 is a superior nuclear fuel, producing enough neutrons through its fission (whether by a fast or thermal neutron) to allow sufficient conversion of thorium to U-233 to replace its consumption. That makes it very unique and very valuable.
Alvin Weinberg and the other researchers on the Molten-Salt Reactor Program (MSRP) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recognized this property of U-233 and sought to demonstrate its actual use in a real nuclear reactor. The MSRE was designed for this purpose. When the MSRE was first brought to criticality in June 1965, this was a great accomplishment, but the MSRP researchers had something more in mind. Therefore, after a few years of operation, they removed the initial uranium inventory from the reactor by fluorination and replaced it with uranium-233.
To commemorate this accomplishment, they invited Dr. Glenn Seaborg to ORNL to be the one to first take the MSRE to a significant power level on uranium-233 fuel. Seaborg’s participation was significant on several levels. At that time, Seaborg was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) which had funded the development of the MSRE. But even more importantly, it was Seaborg who had a led of team of chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, to discover uranium-233 in the early days of the Manhattan Project. Seaborg was the first person to grasp the potential of thorium as an energy source when he received information about the performance of uranium-233 in the ORNL Graphite Reactor in late 1944.