Thorium nuclear reactors not effective, not a viable technology

‘Even if thorium technology does progress to the point where it might be commercially viable, it will face the same problems as conventional nuclear: it is not renewable or sustainable and cannot effectively connect to smart grids. The technology is not tried and tested, and none of the main players is interested. Thorium reactors are no more than a distraction.’

Don’t believe the spin on thorium being a ‘greener’ nuclear option, The Ecologist, Eifion Rees, 23rd June, 2011 “………China, Russia, France and the US are also pursuing the technology, while India’s department of atomic energy and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council are jointly funding five UK research programmes into it.

There is a significant sticking point to the promotion of thorium as the ‘great green hope’ of clean energy production: it remains unproven on a commercial scale. While it has been around since the 1950s (and an experimental 10MW LFTR did run for five years during the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, though using uranium and plutonium as fuel) it is still a next generation nuclear technology – theoretical.

China did announce this year that it intended to develop a thorium MSR, but nuclear radiologist Peter Karamoskos, of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), says the world shouldn’t hold its breath.

‘Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.’

China’s development will persist until it experiences the ongoing major technical hurdles the rest of the nuclear club have discovered, he says.

Others see thorium as a smokescreen to perpetuate the status quo: the closest the world has come to an operating thorium reactor is India’s Kakrapar-1, a uranium-fuelled PWR that was the first to use thorium to flatten power across the core.   ‘This could be seen to excuse the continued use of PWRs until thorium is [widely] available,’ points out Peter Rowberry of No Money for Nuclear (NM4N) and Communities Against Nuclear Expansion (CANE).

In his reading, thorium is merely a way of deflecting attention and criticism from the dangers of the uranium fuel cycle and excusing the pumping of more money into the industry.

Why is the nuclear lobby so quiet?

And yet the nuclear industry itself is also sceptical, with none of the big players backing what should be – in PR terms and in a post-Fukushima world – its radioactive holy grail: safe reactors producing more energy for less and cheaper fuel.

In fact, a 2010 National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) report concluded the thorium fuel cycle ‘does not currently have a role to play in the UK context [and] is likely to have only a limited role internationally for some years ahead’ – in short, it concluded, the claims for thorium were ‘overstated’. ….

even were its commercial viability established, given 2010’s soaring greenhouse gas levels, thorium is one magic bullet that is years off target. Those who support renewables say they will have come so far in cost and efficiency terms by the time the technology is perfected and upscaled that thorium reactors will already be uneconomic. Indeed, if renewables had a fraction of nuclear’s current subsidies they could already be light years ahead.

Extra radioactive waste

All other issues aside, thorium is still nuclear energy, say environmentalists, its reactors disgorging the same toxic byproducts and fissile waste with the same millennial half-lives. Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2, says the fission materials produced from thorium are of a different spectrum to those from uranium-235, but ‘include many dangerous-to-health alpha and beta emitters’.

Tickell says thorium reactors would not reduce the volume of waste from uranium reactors. ‘It will create a whole new volume of radioactive waste, on top of the waste from uranium reactors. Looked at in these terms, it’s a way of multiplying the volume of radioactive waste humanity can create several times over.’

Putative waste benefits – such as the impressive claims made by former Nasa scientist Kirk Sorensen, one of thorium’s staunchest advocates – have the potential to be outweighed by a proliferating number of MSRs. There are already 442 traditional reactors already in operation globally, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The by-products of thousands of smaller, ostensibly less wasteful reactors would soon add up.

Anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Karamoskos goes further, dismissing a ‘dishonest fantasy’ perpetuated by the pro-nuclear lobby.

Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – ‘so these are really U-233 reactors,’ says Karamoskos.

This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).  Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium’s superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. …..

In the meantime, says Jean McSorley, senior consultant for Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign, the pressing issue is to reduce energy demand and implement a major renewables programme in the UK and internationally – after all, even conventional nuclear reactors will not deliver what the world needs in terms of safe, affordable electricity, let alone a whole raft of new ones.

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/952238/dont_believe_the_spin_on_thorium_being_a_greener_nuclear_option.html

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July 21, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, spinbuster, technology, Uranium

5 Comments »

Since he has been mentioned in the Article, lets read what Sorensen thinks of it…
http://energyfromthorium.com/rees-article-rebuttal/

Comment by Hraster | July 22, 2011 | Reply
half life for U232 is wrong, its 96 years, not 160000 years…

Comment by Hraster | July 22, 2011 | Reply
Thanks, Hraster, for this correction

Comment by Christina MacPherson | July 22, 2011 | Reply
Tickell says thorium reactors would not reduce the volume of waste from uranium reactors. ‘It will create a whole new volume of radioactive waste, on top of the waste from uranium reactors. Looked at in these terms, it’s a way of multiplying the volume of radioactive waste humanity can create several times over.’

This is dissembling (distorting) what would happen when these prove to be effective and prove to put out much less nuclear waste. What would happen is that the old-style reactors could and would start being taken off-line.

This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).  Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium’s superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. …..

Again, misdirection – by not giving the QUANTITIES of these. And the first one listed is TOTAL BS, because (and the author KNOWS THIS) the U-232 is PRODUCED out of the Thorium and the U-232 created is returned back to the reactor and is the actual FUEL for fissioning. The U-232 in the core creates new U-232 which goes into the core to create new U-232, on and on.

This entice article is a hack job from this existing lackey pro-LWR nuclear press because the LWR industry will be put out of business if Thorium reactors succeed.

Comment by Steve Garcia, Cary, IL | August 5, 2011 | Reply
- An analogy….
  Picture a stack of 100 pieces of premium oak firewood. You put it in the first commercial wood stove developed. The stove is expensive, large and unstable. It can tip over and catch the house on fire. You light it up. You get some heat and after a while it goes out. You take out the spent fuel which turns out to be 99 ½ pieces of firewood. You store it on your property and wait for it to decay back into soil. Imagine all the stacks of slightly burnt firewood around your house after a long winter. That is what happens with the PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) or LWR fueled by U235. U235 is about as scarce as Platinum.
  
  Now take a stack of 100 pieces of inexpensive recycled firewood or use the 99 ½ slightly burnt pieces from the previous example. Put this fuel in a high tech, compact, low cost, safe, high efficiency wood stove and light it up. It burns for about 200 times longer. At the end you take out the waste which has burned to ashes and weighs about the same as one piece of firewood. After being stored in your yard for a short time the ash is completely decayed to a safe state and returns to the soil. This is the MSR running on thorium. Thorium is as available as tin or lead and is about 500 times the abundance of U235. This reactor is recommended by the superstars of nuclear power. (Glenn Seaborg, Alvin Weinberg, Eugene Wigner)
  
  I think the NRC is going to push back hard on my suggestion that they try to advocate for MSR development, saying, “R&D of new reactors is not our job.” But really the nuclear waste is their problem. There is obviously some money laying around since $18 billion was blown on retrofitting Yucca Mtn.
  
  Moreover the current NRC regulatory structure stifles innovation. They have never licensed any reactors for commercial use other than PWR/LwR. So instead of calling MSR a reactor they should just consider MSRs to be a converter system that transforms unmanageable large amounts of long lived waste into manageable small amounts of short lived waste. As a side benefit it produces lots of heat for power production. As a side benefit this system also solves the global energy crisis for the next 1000 years because it can be run on thorium which is abundant.
  
  Comment by eromni | March 26, 2014 | Reply