Thorium

Power

A forgotten war technology could safely power Earth for millions of years. Here's why we aren't using it

The lifeblood of modern civilization is affordable, free-flowing energy. 

DYI:  Absolutely, without the free flow of inexpensive energy in some form the U.S. including the world would be thrown back 150⁺ years economically along with a severely reduced standard of living.  This is not some doom and gloom scenario; it is a harsh reality.   

It gives us the power to heat our homes. Grow and refrigerate food. Purify water. Manufacture products. Perform organ transplants. Drive a car. Go to work. Or procrastinate from work by reading a story about the future of energy. 

Today's cheap, bountiful supplies make it hard to see humanity's looming energy crisis, but it's possibly coming within our lifetimes. Our numbers will grow from 7.36 billion people today to 9 billion in 2040, an increase of 22%. Rapidly developing nations, however, will supercharge global energy consumption at more than twice that rate.

Fossil fuels could quench the planet's deep thirst for energy, but they'd be a temporary fix at best. Known reserves may dry up within a century or two. And burning up that carbon-based fuel would accelerate climate change, which is already on track to disrupt and jeopardize countless lives.

DYI:  Why do these authors feel compelled to throw in climate change?  I’m old enough to remember global cooling during the 1970’s when that didn’t pan out so called researchers switched to global warming all brought to you by falsified data.  Once that was known it was off to the races with climate change.  The elite’s agenda is for a world wide carbon tax to fund the U.N. into a one world government.  Carbon taxes would be directed into projects owned by the elites to increase their wealth and power.

The need for oil & gas is at feverish pace any wonder why the U.S. is in the Middle East?  The war on terror is a ton of crap only an excuse to further the U.S. aims of securing energy AND a continuing of the petrol dollar.  Without the recycling back into Treasury bills, notes, and bonds inflation would take off like a jack rabbit as the dollar would decline severely.  

Meanwhile, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, though key parts of a solution, are not silver bullets — especially if the world is to meet a 2050 deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Energy from fusion is promising, but it's not yet proved to work, let alone on a commercial and competitive scale.

DYI:  Wind and solar are not even a key solution to the problem simply more lip service to the anti carbon crowd.  Wind power is damn expensive – along with massive bird kills – provides electricity only when the wind is blowing making storage such as batteries or flywheels a necessary component.  Ditto for solar panels just substitute night for wind.  At best they are excellent augmentation in areas suitable such as the desert southwest for solar or the coast lines of our two oceans or great lakes for a steady stream of wind.

What does hold great promise in the green area is energy efficiency and recovery.  L.E.D. light bulbs, improved building materials and methods for commercial or homes, energy management through the use of smart meters, along with programmable thermostats, triple pane windows and lest we forget improved fuel economy for cars/trucks and improved mass transit.  The list in detail is broad and deep; each method or technology by itself is not a game changer.  When brought to bear in mass constitutes huge savings without a change in living standard or lifestyle.  Also a majority of these technologies or methods are relatively inexpensive.

Fusion power is a long way off nothing wrong with attempting to develop it; it is simply multiple decades away.   

Nuclear reactors, on the other hand, fit the bill: They're dense, reliable, emit no carbon, and — contrary to bitter popular sentiment — are among the safest energy sources on earth. Today, they supply about 20% of America's energy, though by the 2040s, this share may drop to 10% as companies shut down decades-old reactors, according to a July 2016 report released by Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

Called a molten-salt reactor, the technology was conceived during the Cold War and forgoes solid nuclear fuel for a liquid one, which it can "burn" with far greater efficiency than any power technology in existence. It also generates a small fraction of the radioactive waste compared to today's commercial reactors, which all rely on solid fuel. 

And, in theory, molten-salt reactors can never melt down.

What's more, feeding a molten-salt reactor a radioactive waste from mining, called thorium (which is three to four times more abundant than uranium), can "breed" as much nuclear fuel as it burns up. 

Manhattan Project scientist Alvin Weinberg calculated in 1959 that if we could somehow harvest all the thorium in the Earth's crust and use it in this way, we could power civilization for tens of billions of years. 

"The technology is viable, the science has been demonstrated," Hans Gougar, a nuclear engineer at INL, told Business Insider. 

Demonstrated, because government scientists built two complementary prototypes during the 1950s and '60s. 

They weren't good for making nuclear weapons, 

so bureaucrats pulled funding for the revolutionary energy technology.

DYI:  Need I say more?  The smoking gun; the U.S. was/is far more interested in making nuclear weapons than energy nor did the fossil fuel industry having a major competitor.  Between the two commercial development was doomed.

The last working molten-salt reactor shut down in 1969.

But in the years leading up to the war's end, Manhattan Project scientists were dreaming up ways to turn their wartime research into commercial power sources, and one group arrived at a brilliant concept: a super-fuel-efficient "breeder" reactor that ran on thorium and U-233.

A molten-salt reactor emerged as the clear choice, since it could be built small: The fluid dramatically increases the efficiency of nuclear fission by making it easy to remove fission products, helping it burn up almost all the nuclear fuel and boosting energy output.

 Martin succinctly describes Shippingport's success in his book: 

"The Shippingport Atomic Power Station first went critical in December 1957 and produced energy for the Duquesne Light Company for 25 years. 

It occupies a unique position in the history of nuclear power. It was considered the first full-scale nuclear power reactor with no military use: all it did was produce energy. [...] 

Shippingport proved that you could use thorium as an inexpensive and safe nuclear fuel in a light-water reactor and that you could breed additional fuel with it. 

This was not alchemy, but it was close." 

Sorensen and other entrepreneurs would discover this history decades later and attempt to revive Weinberg's dream.

 The LFTR is Sorensen's own spin on Weinberg's thorium breeder reactor work from the 1960s. 

A 2015 independent review of the LFTR concept by the Electric Power Research Institute deemed it a "potentially transformational technology for meeting future energy needs in the face of uncertain market, policy, and regulatory constraints." 

Here's part of the laundry list of reasons why Sorensen and others say that's the case: 

• Fuel burn-up is extraordinarily high. LFTRs could fission about 99% of their U-233 liquid fuel, compared to a few percent for solid fuel.

• It's easy to clean up. Solid fuels build up fission products, or new elements generated by the splitting of atoms, which poison fission reactions and often end up being treated as waste. Liquid fuels, meanwhile, can be processed "online" — and the fission products continuously removed, refined, and sold.

• There's less waste and it's shorter-lived. For the above reasons, hundreds of times less radioactive waste is left over from LFTR operation compared to LWRs. And what remains requires burial for about 300 years, as opposed to 10,000 years.

• LFTRs operate under safe, normal pressure. All commercial reactors compress water coolant to extreme pressures — upwards of 150 times that found at Earth's surface. One small breach can lead to a catastrophic explosion. If a LFTR pipe breaks, however, molten salt will only spill on the ground and freeze.

• Environmental contamination is far less likely. LWRs can release gases, fuel, and fission products into the air and water. Molten salt freezes and traps most contaminants.

• LFTRs can be made small and modular. LWRs require giant, reinforced-concrete containment vessels that scale with their operating pressure. LFTRs require small containment structures, so they could be made small — possibly to a size that'd fit inside a semi-trailer.

• They should be much cheaper and faster to build. LFTRs don't require many of the expensive safeguards that LWRs do. Their potential to be modular could also lead to mass manufacture of parts and reduced cost.

• LFTR is immune to meltdowns. Molten salt that overheats will expand, slowing down fission.

• The design is "walk-away safe." No nuclear power plant today can claim this. LWRs require backup power systems to cool solid fuel at all times. If power is knocked out to a LFTR, a freeze plug melts and lets the molten salt fall into underground containment units, where it freezes and stops fission.

• Electricity output is better. LFTRs are so hot, operating at roughly 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, they can use more advanced heat-to-electricity conversion technologies.

• The excess heat is very useful. It could boil and desalinate ocean water into drinking water, help generate hydrogen for fuel cells, break down organic waste into biofuels, and power industrial processes.

• The "kindling" to start a LFTR is flexible. Burning up old nuclear weapons material is possible, since fissile U-233, U-235, or Pu-239 can be used to start the reactor.

The list goes on. 

With these and other benefits, it's easy to get excited about LFTRs, other molten-salt reactors, and even thorium-fueled LWRs.

 DYI