Thorium for Nuclear power...the hippie friendly nuke?

thedguy

thedguy

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Grabbed this out of the latest Wired mag (jan-2010)













Basically it's claiming that thorium (vs uranium) is far more common of a fuel, it's significantly more efficient, it's harder to reprocess it for weaponry (though still possible), and best yet...

It's actually safe. The fuel is self regulating and doesn't need massive acreage for the site + significantly more to protect the populous in the area from potential explosions, i.e Chernobyl is far less likely to happen. All the reactions that happen are predictable, where uranium fuel cases some things to react in an unpredictable manner.

The Tech has been around since the 50's, but since uranium is far easier to process into nuclear bombs, the government pushed to use uranium (I'm sure Spectre would love to chime in on this bit about government being inefficient here).
 
Well the UAW did push for uranium back in the day ...




:p
 
CD82 said:
Sounds too good to be true... :(
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Why? Uranium was just the first/easiest for us to figure out how to make work. As with any technology, time and research do wonders.

Thorium designs and research has been around and constantly developed since the 60's. The French are pushing toward using it and putting a good bit of effort into it.

You might as well look at a modern ICE and say "sounds too good to be true" as if you look at it from the stand point of someone in 1980 it probably is. Modern engines in many places clean the air, get near double the fuel economy while pulling nearly double the weight and achieving power numbers that took 2-3 times the displacement.
 
So which country controls the world's thorium supplies? This stuff has to come out of the ground like everything else. Just something to consider.
 
Labcoatguy said:
So which country controls the world's thorium supplies? This stuff has to come out of the ground like everything else. Just something to consider.
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Australia, India, Brazil, Norway, Canada, United States are believe to hold some of the greatest deposits. It is quite fortunate that the deposits are not located in China and Russia.
 
ESPNSTI said:
:eek:
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Hmmm. My maths say over 10 pools :blink:

2571kJ to convert 1kg of 25?C water to 100?C steam.
6.43TJ to convert one pool of 2500m?.
669kJ per pulse, 100 million pulses per second, 66.9TJ/s.
Divide 66.9TJ/s by 6.43TJ/pool you get 10.4 pools/s. Steamy :lmao:


Depends on your definition of "boil" though. To heat water to 100?C or to produce steam :lol: my maths produce steam, if all you wanted to do was heat water from 25?C to 100?C then you'd need 0.78TJ/pool, or 85 pools/s.
 
CraigB said:
Very interesting. I always find it odd how something this good can be bypassed for another source, just because of bad politics...
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I find it odd that you find anything odd in the context of politics. :p
 
Oh snap, Winland must be developing more nukes with the new reactor that should already been finished a year or two ago. Damn that mad red haired socialistic president of ours, you've doomed us all!


On a slightly more serious note: very neat.
 
All sounds very nice. I'm sure there's a catch.
 
AiR said:
All sounds very nice. I'm sure there's a catch.
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That's what I was trying to say (and I'm glad someone else got that feeling as well). If it was as easy as the article makes out, and there really are no drawbacks, then it kind of makes no sense, that even countries that never intended to build nuclear weapons, would only develop uranium-based reactors.
 
I believe that one of the major concerns around the use of Thorium is that while it in general is a superior solution, there are a couple of conditions (which have to do with stuff that's beyond my brain level) under which is can become spectacularly unstable and generate massive amounts of heat (giving you the Chernobyl style result).

However, as technology progresses, it's entirely possible that the risks can be reduced -- clearly from all the development going on, there are a few countries that feel the risk *has* been brought down the acceptable levels.

Steve
 
Wired always has good stuff, thanks for sharing. I did awful in Chemistry, so I'll just pretend that all of this makes sense to me. :lol:

CD82 said:
That's what I was trying to say (and I'm glad someone else got that feeling as well). If it was as easy as the article makes out, and there really are no drawbacks, then it kind of makes no sense, that even countries that never intended to build nuclear weapons, would only develop uranium-based reactors.
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Like everyone else said ... of course it doesn't make sense: it's politics. Why would a country (even if they supposedly didn't want nukes) go and dump a bunch of money into building the first thorium reactor when the technology already exists to build a uranium one? Doing so would probably be cheaper in the short term and would give them the ability to build nukes later if they want.
 
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