So fusion, you say, is like the wayward little brother of fission – full of promise for a clean energy future but just needs a little help and guidance from the government to get on his feet. We should all help our little brothers right? Let me tell you about my little brother. He’ll show up to the party late and talk a big game but, then drink too much and promptly pass out in the shower with the water running. Once people get the water damage bills they’re reluctant to invite him back. I don’t know about you, but my little brother is an idiot – and fusion power is the idiot little brother of fission. It promises the world and talks a big game but then utterly fails to deliver, passing out in a shower of research dollars too drunk to make it to work in the morning. I’m not saying that it will never work but effectively you’re trying to contain a tiny sun and, from a thermodynamic perspective, the more energy you demand from it the less it wants to work. If the objective is a carbon-free alternative energy future I want a solution that doesn’t involve my great-grandchildren becoming physicists.
Thorium!
If you’re serious, and I mean really serious, about solving the primary energy/carbon problem then there is only one winner and it isn’t fusion, wind, wave, solar, hydro, or geothermal. Sorry Hippies, it’s good ol’ baby killin’ fission that fixes Mother Earth. Wait! I see you readying your empty bottles of patchouli, so before you throw them up here or drench me in bong-water let me walk that back just a little. The atomic fission I’m referring to isn’t baby killing or actually related in any way to the fission which gave us Megadeth, i.e. the kind most of us know and love. It’s special. Different. So radical that Nixon killed it. Why? Because he couldn’t turn it into a weapon, man.
Just ask Alvin Weinberg about Thorium-232 and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Except you can’t because he’s dead. The Atomic Energy Commission killed him, probably with Nixon’s help. And then they got Clinton to hide the body. What, my hat? You can’t read it in the back? Its mesh backed and has “Miller High Life” embroidered on the front, and no, a tin-foil lining would be inelegant so stop interrupting. Nixon did actually kill the program, the AEC fired Weinberg to shut him up, and Clinton buried everything when he terminated all funding for advanced nuclear research in this country.
Let’s do a thought experiment. I want you to imagine an America where the cost of energy is decoupled from the global price of oil. Imagine that the gas you pump into your car is so pure that it doesn’t need a catalytic converter. Imagine that same gasoline is made from seawater and is therefore carbon neutral. Imagine carbon neutral plastics, lubricants, sealants, solvents, fertilizers, oils and generally the materials which make up the modern world. Imagine a machine that could pull all the carbon we’ve put in the air back in the ground. What does that world look like? That was the dream Alvin Weinberg had about Thorium-232 when he designed the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment – The Thorium Dream. Now do you want on this ride?
A lifetime supply
I’m mainlining straight truth and Kirk Sorenson is my Kid Charlemagne. He found Weinberg’s body decaying in some cellar at Oak Ridge National Lab and has been spreading the gospel to anybody who’ll listen. Right now that’s the Chinese and Indian governments and they’re throwing billions at Thorium Molten Salt Reactors because they actually work. America invented this technology and, for reasons to maddening to dive into in a short article, abandoned then effectively forgot it ever existed. America is a land of dreamers, thinkers, builders, and doers – aren’t we? Surely someone around here with money and vision would want to reap the benefits of our previous research. I mean, we worked out the bulk of this stuff on the taxpayer dime back in the 60’s, so, naturally, the Chinese and Indians are asking our labs for help. We’re just giving it all away on the gamble they’ll share their breakthroughs with us. We can step up our game or we can stumble drunkenly into a future defined by other countries where people are willing to take risks and dream big.
Carbon isn’t a problem.
It makes me gassy.
Agreed, but when arguing with ecomentalists its useful to just accept it as a premise and move them toward the uncomfortable position “if carbon bad then nuclear good.” The best reasons for thorium are economic, which I’ll try and cover in a later article if they let me.
This is why it’s so important to get that carbon tax up and running ASAP.
Taking this seriously for a moment, the same effect could be achieved by how the NRC regulates new nuclear installations. Once you back out the regulatory costs, thorium can beats coal for lifecycle cost per kwh.
NICE.
I not too long ago read a handy little primer on the molten salt reactor at Business Insider, of all places. Originally intended to power SAC bombers, according to the article. Yee Haw!
Its origins predate that by a little bit but, for rough history yes. The story NEPA / ANP nuclear turbine engines is fascinating in its own right.
It’s special. Different. So radical that Nixon killed it. Why? Because he couldn’t turn it into a weapon, man.
That, and, rather hilariously, because the anti-nuclear protests were going on and he decided to get rid of the one program that wasn’t producing weapons-grade fission material for bombs, and hippies were too stupid to understand that.
Man, fuck everyone in the 70s.
They had that base covered from what I hear.
…With knobby tree branches and switchblades.
I’m hoping to get more into that in a followup piece. The short, short, version is that the early AEC was tasked with providing the fissile material for all weapons and looked at US civilian reactors as a good source.
Agreed!
Well, except the Ramones.
very nice
I remember hearing about this alternate nukular energy source.
What prevents private firms from pursuing this technology?
1) The literal impossibility of obtaining a license from the NRC to do so, and this is even after the Bush era attempts to streamline the process. 2) Risk – in terms of regulatory liability. That’s something I’ll also be posting on in the future I hope.
So ultimately, as with so many things, armed thugs stand in the way of real progress.
The irony being that the American scientists and engineers at the national labs responsible for developing the technology, and to a lesser extent the major companies (who both run the labs and manufacture the systems), have decided China is the best bet for actually commercializing it because – in spite of all the technology transfer issues – their regulatory burden is lower than in the US.
There was just a PBS NOVA aired on this topic : “The Nuclear Option.”
I’ll have to watch it. Sorta OT: NOVA was on my list of favorite TV shows for quite a long time, I remember them being the first exposure in an engineering context to Chernobyl in the early 90s
I agree that, generally, NOVA is pretty good. That said, I saw a terrible new episode of NOVA yesterday that was a straight up advertisement for the train industry. They, for example, mentioned California’s “High Speed Rail” without mentioning how very, very, extremely unlikely it was that it will ever be built.
I like the idea of smaller widely distributed power stations. My extremely limited understanding leads me to believe water cooling is a massive obstacle to conventional reactor design. I have talked to a couple of ex-navy nuclear technicians who say the reactor in a sub or surface ship could easily power a small to medium city, if you could cool it.
Eliminate the water cooling, and a distributed network is more feasible.
This is true. The army actually did power a city with a small modular reactor for a while. One of the dim rays of sunshine in all of this mess is that the US military has an independent licensing authority from the NRC and is waking up to the economic case for portable liquid fuel reactors.
You know who else needed to find an alternative fuel source…
Dr. Emmett Brown?
+1.21 Jiggawatts!
To be pedantic, it was actually Marty McFly who needed the alternate fuel source. *sniff*
The starship Enterprise when their Dylitheum crystals ran out?
The English.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1615.htm
The Germans!
Wow, way to ruin the thread before we could add more snark.
Vegans?
Do I get a Flying Car out of it?
http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/10/back_to_the_future_day.html
The Jetsons takes place in like 2062. So will 2062 look more like the Jetsons or more like 1962?
Good piece. Even warmist true bleevers are advocating nukes, which is great, because it will mean that the bullshit artist warmies will have to either admit they’ve been lying, or consent to nuclear power gaining a larger role.
And they won’t ever admit they’ve been lying.
Skip the thorium and use uranium in the MSR. Thorium brings in a lot of extra headaches and requirements for essentially first of a kind technologies. No need to breed fissile material when the world is flush with cheap uranium.
Hey Smilin’ Joe, welcome to Glib.
Thanks UnCivilServant. Been a long time lurker and sometimes commenter over at the site which will not be named, but soon after this site was established I moved over. It’s too bad what has happened at the old site.
From a technical perspective, uranium has more life-cycle headaches which add cost. For example, uranium mining. Right now we have an excellent industrial source of pure thorium as a waste stream from Lithium production. Uranium also limiting in that a uranium fuel cycle necessitates separating isotopes whereas a U233/Thorium breeder does not, this makes it hard to design a reactor which can operate as a continuous process. From a pure resource level standpoint, there is more thorium in the Earth’s crust than uranium. Burning down technical risk is less expensive than the life-cycle costs.
I’d agree with you, but if the goal is to make this thing a real reactor and not just essentially a paper reactor, uranium gets you there much quicker. The supply line to enrich uranium is established and understood and uranium is cheap so the abundance of thorium in the earth isn’t that much of an advantage right now. There has never been a power reactor that has run purely on the thorium fuel cycle. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea or worse than using enriched uranium, but the quickest and cheapest way (especially from a regulatory point of view) is to build this thing running on uranium fuel.
After we establish that this technology is extremely feasible and cheaper than LWR’s/CANDUs then thorium is the next step.
No dispute here. I assume that a necessary part of the technical risk reduction would be running uranium liquid fuel reactors. However from a regulatory standpoint (current NRC system), there are no efficiencies gained by going with uranium first because each reactor is effectively treated as a novel reactor. This means doing the technically sensible thing from an engineering standpoint actually doubles your regulatory cost. From a systems standpoint, its also hard to see the advantage of deploying a fleet of Uranium cycle reactors and later deploying LFTRs. I’ll hopefully also be posting some later articles on cost calculations if you’re interested, but in aggregate I agree it would be nice to see the fuels compete on an equal economic footing. Right now the whole problem is enmeshed in government capture of the R&D process.
As an aside there are some more niche but very useful product applications for purely uranium liquid fuel reactors and isotopes of uranium, if (in the long term – i.e. 10~20k years) you consider uranium as a strategic resource, it is arguably better to conserve it and breed 233 from thorium which has little value other than as a fuel.
If the oil interests hadn’t prevented Tesla from giving the world endless free wireless energy, we would not even be talking about thorium.
Great thought provoking article. This is the first I’ve heard of Thorium.
Glad to bring new knowledge. My hope is that, markets willing, between MSRs and high energy chemistry we will be using hydrocarbon fuels as a mechanism for energy transfer and less as primary energy.
Of topical interest, an old Google Tech Talk on the subject: Fission is the new fire
Good stuff… Also, I’ve been wondering – that avatar of your is Castle Bravo?
Mururoa
I question the good of the continuing ban on testing.
In the short term, it seems to me that pushing for “safer” reactor designs, regardless of fuel type, would be the more succesful approach. Safer in quotes because existing designs are sufficiently safe, but the public is scared of them. The advantages of thorium over uranium are smaller than the advantages of uranium over carbon (assuming carbon is bad for the sake of argument).
Current designs are sufficiently safe for their current application, though they are not intrinsically safe or walk away safe from the standpoint of risks the public cares about. I advocate for new applications of nuclear for which the Light Water Reactor is neither useful nor sufficiently safe.
Reminds me of linear programming and how the USSR fucked itself in a field where it had a head start on the rest of the developed world. Linear programming is essentially a tool for mathematical optimization in a scenario with lots of linear constraints; it’s fairly ubiquitous nowadays in business and finance. (Hell, petroleum refining is a classic real-world linear programming problem.) If you want to make economic decisions well, in many markets linear programming is the best possible way to do so.
The US/West didn’t really develop the mathematics behind this approach until post-WWII; certain Soviet mathematicians had developed the technique a little after Stalin’s Great Purge and were quite far-sighted in how the technique could be used (including certain market applications). First the technique wasn’t used because the abysmal Five Year Plans were the Wave of The Future® and after the Great Purge no one was stupid or suicidal enough to tell Stalin otherwise (fancy that). After the monster croaked, these techniques started to be looked at but there was so much ideological baggage attached to how it should be used (couldn’t be free market-y, after all) that there was no possible way to implement linear programming in a socialist system with any meaningful improvement. US mathematicians would talk to Soviets and freely use their ideas, but after a certain point the Soviet mathematical contribution wasn’t useful. This left the capitalist west to properly implement ideas that had their true start in Russia.
Hopefully the same doesn’t happen with us wrt energy; securing a good energy source is arguably as important for geopolitics as it is for economics, even.
This sounds pretty fascinating actually, there any histories on it? I’ve gained some understanding of how scientific and engineering efforts operated under the soviet system as a result of Richard Rhodes’s books but they never trended toward mathematics and computational research. I’m wondering if somewhere perhaps there is an analysis of why the soviets fell so far behind the west in that regard, I assume it isn’t because they lacked a capability to independently produce a transistor. I know that there is at least one good book examining the interplay of ideology and how that actually shapes how we, in the West/US, pick and interact with technologies but I can’t recall the name off the top of my head. I’d assume there would be parallels.