Named for the Norse god of thunder, thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as actinides.
The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s le — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.
Published in 1958 under the au es of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
No more love for yellowcake?
Thorium sounds good, but decades away.
This guy has a nice website devoted to 4th gen nuclear reactors:
http://bravenewclimate.com/integral-...nuclear-power/
It is the only nuclear the world should invest in - they can't melt down and run on spent fuel rods.
Seems to me that Thorium would have been used in commercial reactors if it was feasible.
Oh the webs we weave... The Thorium Web...
Problem is, it's half-life is too short. It doesn't give off enough energy. U235 has a half life of 704 million years. U238, which is almost useless for fission has a half life of 4.5 million years. It decays almost 200 times slower, so it just doesn't get hot enough. Now comes Thorium. They have to be talking about 232Th, else it would really be impractical. It's half life is 14 billion years. It decays so slowly, it is harmless to handle. Simply cannot sustain a fission process to create heat.
Now I assume there is some kind of battery that could be made, considering it has an alpha decay. Hard to get any substantial power that way.
OK, the above is my best guess knowing what little I do of fission. I did a little research, found nothing solid to allow thorium to be a usable fission power source. I found this long video, and am watching now. Maybe I'm wrong:
More videos at World news Thorium
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 03-01-2011 at 11:27 PM.
WC, I'm always amazed at your willingness to throw out opinions with no research.
I'm amazed that people think Thorium can be made viable for fission.WC, I'm always amazed at your willingness to throw out opinions with no research.
I did some research. Granted, not much, but enough that I simply don't see it happening.
Remember this thread when 20 years from now, we still aren't using thorium for power generation.
LnGrrrR, do you understand just how next to impossible the theoretical model of the thorium cycle is? You have two neutron bombardment stages of the four cycles. Just how do you direct the neutrons to just the 233U and 232Th when the four isotopes are in the same medium?
To be honest, I doubt I'll remember this thread 20 years from now
Don't get me wrong, I find it great that you are curious about everything. I just think it's funny that you tend to dismiss things out of hand just on a cursory amount of knowledge.
Where's your world famous skepticism when it comes to the resources you viewed?
Sorry WC, I don't claim to be an expert in every subject on this board, that's your niche.Is there any field in which you profess ignorance?
Do you realize that there's mixed Thorium-Uranium nuclear reactors already working, right? Did you even bother to read the article?
The cycle is:
- U233 hit with a neutron produces fission and releases neutrons (just like current uranium fission)
- TH232 absorbs neutron from fission and becomes TH233
- TH233 quickly decays into PA233
- PA233 decays into U233 in about a month thus restarting the cycle
You still need U233 to kickstart the process. The actual reactor fuel is a fluoride-salt mixture that is able to dissolve both uranium and thorium compounds.
Oh, so it's a Hybrid Thorium reactor. Probably a Toyota project.
Can't be. The private sector never invests in R&D.
Concept proven in the THTR in germany.
It looks promising. The fact that uranium/plutonium reactors have been already retrofitted to run on thorium shows there's a path for progress. The major problem for a complete LFTR solution seems to be the materials that are used on the core. They would need to be much stronger than what's currently used as there's much more heat generated under that process.
It looks to me like this could be a good solution for nuclear power without the risk of nuclear weapon proliferation.
Besides the nuclear fuel, there are two big financial aspects that can be fatal to ANY kind of nuclear plant construction. With no cap on for-profit insurance payouts, the private insurance industry wouldn't write the policies.
1. Construction insurance and operating insurance. Right now, because the private sector insurers' reluctance, the US govt (that same one so many of you love to hate) covers nuclear catastrophe costs beyond the insured cap of $11B.
2. Construction loans. Our beloved Wall St criminals will not lend the money
1) the construction cost + time overruns are infamously unpredictable. , even locating a site and getting the licenses are unpredictable. They could add on penalties for delayed repayment and cost overruns, then the project would become horribly more expensive(profitable for Wall St), and the cost per kilowatt hour would be even more uncompe ive with coal and natural gas plants.
(Of course, if all the external costs of coal-fired plants were included in the kilowatt hour of coal, it would be much more expensive)
2) the interest rate (Wall St profit) will be lower than the returns Wall St and internationals player get from jacking each other off, from defrauding each other, and defrauding retail/fund customers in the Wall St/international rigged casinos.
iow, why would Wall St lend money on something as flakey as nuclear plant construction rather than sticking with the more certain, higher rate casino payback? In fact, Wall St casino winnings pay more than lending to the Real Economy.
And there's lots of controversy about fresh uranium supplies. The US hasn't bothered with recylcing spent fuel. France, yes mf'ing France, has:
"In France, well over 1000 metric tons of spent fuel is reprocessed every year without incident at the La Hague chemical complex, on the Normandy coast. La Hague receives all the spent fuel rods from France’s 59 reactors. The sprawling facility is operated by the state-controlled nuclear giant Areva, and has racked up a good environmental record. The French effort clearly shows that reprocessing does not need to be the dangerous mess that other countries, including the United States, have made of it in the past.
France uses an improved version of the 63-year-old Purex process (“plutonium-uranium extraction”), which was developed during the Manhattan Project. Areva says the separation equipment employed is more compact than its predecessors and generates less waste. The major products of the separation are uranium and plutonium. The uranium consists of the isotopes 235U and 238U, making up 95 percent of the spent fuel. The plutonium accounts for a little more than 1 percent.
Even the largest of France’s reactors, which can produce 1300 megawatts, generate just 20 canisters of high-level waste per year. According to Areva, it’s about a factor of 10 reduction in the mass of highly radioactive waste needing to be stored under the most stringent conditions, and a four- or fivefold reduction in volume relative to leaving a plant’s spent fuel unseparated."
http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=...ortage-fallacy
Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-02-2011 at 11:14 AM.
Thorium, that's fking awesome. Inb4 the next nuke dropped is named Mjöllnir.
Sciences as we understand them are pretty well established. I've toyed around with some hypothesis about how it could be achieved, but real doubtful it could be done. It falls along the same line as turning mercury into gold. Anyone show a proven method yet, after all these centuries of trying?To be honest, I doubt I'll remember this thread 20 years from now
Don't get me wrong, I find it great that you are curious about everything. I just think it's funny that you tend to dismiss things out of hand just on a cursory amount of knowledge.
Where's your world famous skepticism when it comes to the resources you viewed?
OK, they fluff the talk up nice about speaking of salt reactors. These are proven methods of using Uranium, and possibly plutonium for making power. Thorium is a whole different beast. As I pointed out before, it's half-life is so long, it is effectively inert. We would have no problem using it as alloys in everyday metals.
Here is the natural decay process of thorium:
the propose to change it to this:
but also adding neutron bombardment to the U-233 to change it to Ti-232 again. Now I would like to know how they plan to direct the neutrons at just the U-233 and Ti-232, without creating unwanted isotopes from the Th-233 and Pa-233. they are in a molten salt solution, where you cannot separate them.
I can name problem after problem that would have to be solved. the concept of the breeder reactor isn't such a bad idea. The U-233 can be used to create power. However, the trick is to still get more energy out of it than you put in to start with. You still have to put in a great deal of energy to change the Ti-232 to Ti-233. Another issue that occurs as the isotopes decay is they don't decay 100% to a desired form. The Pa-233 not only changes to U-233, but also Pa-232 then U-232.
The theories have been out there for decades to make thorium work. Nobody has created one yet that produces more power than it takes to drive the process.
Believe in perpetual motion also by chance?
Ok, I found an image that helps explain their proposal. I forgot where it was when I made the last post:
Looks like a proposed perpetual motion machine to me, to get more energy out than put in.
Duh... No Sherlock.
Start counting the neutrons. Tell me if you see viability.
Except it used a fairly good percentage of U-235, and was shut down because it wasn't economically feasible. It produced less than 400 megawatts of usable power.
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