Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins, could provide cleaner, safer, almost-waste-free energy

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. What they have done, though, which is still very cool, is use thorium instead of uranium in a conventional nuclear reactor. In one fell swoop, thorium fuel, which is safer, less messy to clean up, and not prone to nuclear weapons proliferation, could quench the complaints of nuclear power critics everywhere.

In a conventional nuclear reactor, enriched uranium fuel is converted into plutonium and small amounts of other transuranic compounds. There are ways to recycle plutonium, but for many countries, such as the USA, it is simply a waste product of nuclear power — a waste product that will be dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is arguing the nastiness of plutonium. Any technological development that could reduce the production of plutonium, or consume our massive stocks of plutonium waste, would be a huge boon for the Earth’s (and humanity’s) continued well-being. 

Enter thorium. Natural thorium, which is fairly cheap and abundant (more so than uranium), doesn’t contain enough fissile material (thorium-231) to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. By mixing thorium oxide with 10% plutonium oxide, however, criticality is achieved. This fuel, which is called thorium-MOX (mixed-oxide), can then be formed into rods and used in conventional nuclear reactors. Not only does this mean that we can do away with uranium, which is expensive to enrich, dangerous, and leads to nuclear proliferation, but it also means that we finally have an easy way of recycling plutonium. Furthermore, the thorium-MOX fuel cycle produces no new plutonium; it actually reduces the world’s stock of plutonium. Oh, thorium-MOX makes for safer nuclear reactors, too, due to a higher melting point and thermal conductivity.


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Reactor reuses nuclear waste (Thorium Reactor)

Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidates are designing a nuclear power plant that would convert nuclear waste from conventional reactors into electricity — a plant you could walk away from, they said, without the risk of a radioactive leak like the meltdown last year that crippled parts of Japan.

Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, co-founders of Transatomic Power, have developed the WAMSR, or Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor, a 400- to 500-megawatt plant that would convert high-level nuclear waste into electric power, at a price competitive with fossil fuels.

“About two years ago, we got really excited about nuclear power because we saw so much potential in the industry to improve the design of reactors and stretch the limits of the technology,” said Dewan, 27.

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Wyoming nuclear task force hears thorium reactor plan

Kirk Sorensen claims a person can literally hold a lifetime’s supply of power in his or her hand.
Presenting to the Wyoming Task Force for Nuclear Energy Production via phone late last week, Sorensen touted the benefits of thorium — a possible competitor for uranium — in energy production.

“Thorium energy is much easier,” he said. “It can present a great advantage if we can use it.”

Sorensen, president and chief technologist of Huntsville, Ala.-based Flibe Energy, told the task force Thursday that his company is looking to establish a liquid fluoride thorium reactor in the United States within the next decade, with Wyoming a possible location.

Among the advantages of using liquid fluoride thorium reactors rather than uranium reactors, he said, are the element’s abundance in the United States, including Wyoming, the reactor’s ability to produce in remote areas and high efficiency.

He said the naturally occurring element and common byproduct of rare earths mining is three times as abundant as the uranium used to fuel modern nuclear power plants and 200 times more efficient. He added that thorium reactors

consume nearly all the thorium used to create energy — uranium-powered reactors consume less than one percent — and thereby create less waste.

Sorensen co-founded Flibe Energy about a year ago with a mission to establish a reactor in the United States. Similar technology is being pursued in China and India, and he told the Wyoming task force that the U.S. can’t afford to lose the thorium race.

“This is too important a technology to yield to another nation,” he said. “They’re running and we’re sitting on the bench.”

The reactor, as proposed by Sorensen, carries another major advantage that could make it a realistic option for Wyoming — the ability to operate in remote areas.

Most nuclear plants require large supplies of water for cooling. But a thorium reactor, he said, could run using a gas-to-air heat exchanger instead, making arid Wyoming a possible fit.

“It relieves you of the burden of having to be next to water,” he said. “Areas that are rather remote are possible.”

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India to establish nuclear reactor that uses Thorium as fuel: Atomic Energy Commission

 BHUBANESWAR: India is planning to establish a nuclear power plant that uses thorium as main fuel instead of uranium, which is used in the conventional reactors. "It is natural for India to go for thorium reactors given the abundance in its supply in the country. We are in the process of selecting an appropriate site for establishing one," said Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman R K Sinha.

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India's Thorium-Fuelled Dreams

Thorium is to nuclear power what the fifth Beatle was to pop music. It's the nuclear fuel that showed glorious promise in the early days of atomic energy but somehow, somewhere along the way, got forgotten.

I first learned about India's plans to revive thorium power in 2009 when I started writing Geek Nation, a book that explores India's apparent ambitions to become a scientific superpower. I was given rare access to the sprawling hub for the country's civilian nuclear program, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, not far from Bombay. Research into thorium-fuelled reactors has been happening on this site since 1955 (a fact made obvious by the feeling of stepping into a time-warp when you pass through the security barriers) and is finally approaching its zenith. It's a project that encapsulates India's dreams to become a global technological leader.

Thorium is the original nuclear fuel. It powered the world's first full-scale atomic power station, built in 1954 in Shippingport in Pennsylvania. And at the time, it seemed ideal: more energy is released by thorium than by the same amount of uranium fuel, which means it creates less waste. It also has fewer long-lived waste elements, which don't need to be stored under such tight conditions or for so long. But after Shippingport was proven to work, uranium became the favored nuclear fuel instead, partly because the properties of thorium meant it couldn't be refined to make weapons.

Today, as the availability and price of uranium becomes a possible barrier to the growth of nuclear power and as nations begin the search for cleaner and safer fuels, thorium is making a comeback, with India leading the way.

"In India, the supply of thorium is at least eight times that of uranium," I was told by Dr. Ratan Kumar Sinha, the director of the reactor design and development group at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Indeed, there are millions of tons of monazite -- the ore from which thorium is extracted -- lying on Indian beaches. His team is now working on an Advanced Heavy Water Reactor, powered by thorium, designed to have a lifespan of a hundred years. It is slated to be up and running within the next couple of years. And if it's successful, the government plans to roll it out as one of India's next-generation power sources.

But these thorium reactors represent something more than simply India's ambitions to expand its energy infrastructure. Like China, this nation of geeks is building a formidable expertise in indigenous nuclear technology.

According to the World Nuclear Association, India wants to supply a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050, up from around three percent now. Sinha's hope is that it might eventually supply half. The civilian nuclear power program also has one eye on the export market -- selling smaller nuclear reactors to developing nations that are desperate for more carbon-free energy.

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Nuclear power entrepreneurs push thorium as a fuel

By Eric Niiler, Published: February 20

One year ago, a massive earthquake spawned a tsunami that nearly destroyed Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, further frightening people who had been wary of nuclear power since accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986.

But a small group of scientists, entrepreneurs and advocates see the post-Fukushima era as the perfect opportunity to get the United States to consider a proposal they have made with no success for years. What about trying a new fuel, they say, and maybe a new kind of reactor?

The proposed fuel is thorium, an abundant silver-gray element named for the Norse god of thunder. It is less radioactive than the uranium that has always powered U.S. plants, and advocates say that not only does it produce less waste, it also is more difficult to turn into nuclear weapons.

They’re pushing the idea of adapting plants to use thorium as a fuel or replacing them with a completely new kind of reactor called a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR (pronounced “lifter”). The LFTR would use a mixture of molten chemical salts to cool the reactor and to transfer energy from the fission reaction to a turbine.

Proponents say such a system would be more efficient and safer than existing plants, which use pressurized water to cool uranium fuel rods and boiling water or steam to transfer the energy they create.

“A molten-salt reactor is not a pressurized reactor,” said John Kutsch, director of the Thorium Energy Alliance, a trade group based in Harvard, Ill. “It doesn’t use water for cooling, so you don’t have the possibility of a hydrogen explosion, as you did in Fukushima.”

Kutsch and others say that a thorium-fueled reactor burns hotter than uranium reactors, consuming more of the fuel. “Ninety-nine percent of the thorium is burned up,” he said. “Instead of 10,000 pounds of waste, you would have 300 pounds of waste.”

‘Small boatloads of fanatics’

Although the idea of thorium power has been around for decades — and some countries are planning to build thorium-powered plants — it has not caught on with the companies that design and build nuclear plants in the United States or with the national research labs charged with investigating future energy sources.

“There are small boatloads of fanatics on thorium that don’t see the downsides,” said Dan Ingersoll, senior project manager for nuclear technology at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. For one thing, he said, it would be too expensive to replace or convert the nuclear power plants already running in this country: “A thorium-based fuel cycle has some advantages, but it’s not compelling for infrastructure and investments.”

He also pointed out that thorium would still have some radioactive byproducts — just not as much as uranium and not as long-lived — and that there is no ready stockpile of thorium in the United States. It would have to be mined.

Overall, he says the benefits don’t outweigh the huge costs of switching technologies. “I’m looking for something compelling enough to trash billions of dollars of infrastructure that we have already and I don’t see that.”

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Credit: Kevin Cole