(1 GWye = roughly the electricity for one million people, living by western standards, for one year)

Let us suppose it is our mission to produce electricity for a run-of-the-mill city with about 1 million inhabitants living by Western standards. This city will need about thousand megawatts of electricity, year round, in short 1GWye.

Coal we have used since we started producing electricity. But how much coal will we need to accomplish our mission? That would be about 1,5 km of freight train, all wagons filled to the brim with coal. Oh yeah, that’s just for a single day. So for one year of electricity in our city, we will need 570 km of coal train: 3.3 million tons of coal in total. Of course, our coal powered plant does not only produce electricity, it also produces 9 million tons of CO2 and 330.000 tons of fly ash.

How much uranium or we going to need to accomplish our mission if we burn it in a conventional nuclear reactor? In a usual Light Water Reactor (LWR) we will first need to mine uranium ore, enough to make about 250 tons of natural uranium. Out of this we will produce about 35 tons of enriched uranium that we can use in our light water reactor. This will leave us with 215 tons of depleted uranium, with which we don’t really know what to do. An LWR can produce the required gigawattyear with 35 tons of enriched uranium.

The third option is to use the fuel in a molten salt reactor that is based on the use of conventional reactor fuel, but then in liquid form. This is the concept of for instance Terrestrial Energy and Thorcon Power. Details of the fuel cycle have not yet been published. [Approx 8 tons of mixed U235/238 per GWye]

The fourth option (on top in the graphic) is the thorium MSR. It basically consists of a vessel containing a mixture of molten salts at high temperature, about 600 degrees Celcius.

we only need a single ton of thorium to produce our GWeY. Most of the waste produced by this process is not really waste. After a year of storage, the waste is separated. 83% consists of precious stuff like rare earth metals and can be sold at a nice profit. The remaining 17% will need to be stored for about 300-500 years. Or sold to NASA: most of it is the very rare Plutonium 238, the stuff used to generate electricity in space when there’s not enough sun. The stuff is rare and priceless…