
Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang - nabla9
https://thebulletin.org/2019/12/fact-check-five-claims-about-thorium-made-by-andrew-yang/#
======
erentz
Yang is to be credited for stating he is open to all possible solutions to the
climate crisis, and rightly pointing out that with a crisis of this magnitude
no solutions should be taken off the table at this point. Something other
candidates are reluctant to do when it comes to the topic of nuclear energy.

He shouldn’t be expected to be an expert in the nuances of the technology or
fuels. This should always be left to the appropriate experts in the Dept of
Energy, etc. The job of the president should be to identify the problem (in
this case climate change), and task the appropriate agencies with solving it,
which will involve a variety of actions.

~~~
RivieraKid
I like that he mentions geo-engineering. To me, the most promising is
stratospheric aerosol injection. I don't understand why there's not more talk
about it given the cost / value ratio.

If it turns out that there are no serious side effects or risk and governments
agree to do it, we have solved climate change.

~~~
hyperbovine
> If it turns out that there are no serious side effects or risk

Literally the only way to determine that would be to try it. And then let’s
hope the proponents are correct, because if not...

There is just so much we don’t understand about the global climate to think
this sort of solution is a good idea. I’ll start taking the geoengineering
people seriously when they can accurately predict the weather one month from
now.

~~~
ants_a
Predicting weather and predicting climate are almost completely different
things. It's about predicting where a single state space trajectory of a
chaotic system ends up versus predicting bounds and average positions for an
ensemble of trajectories. The first is impossible, the second is routinely
done. Think of a double pendulum, one can't predict where it is in an hour,
but can predict reasonably accurately how high it can still go due to the
amount of kinetic and potential energy it is going to have.

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acidburnNSA
I'm involved in a public education nuclear website. We get tons of questions
about thorium so we made a few pages to handle stuff like this. For instance,
we have one on molten salt reactors specifically (which aren't always fueled
with thorium) [1].

[1] [https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html)

And then we have our most popular, the Thorium Myths page [2].

[2] [https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-
myths.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html)

I love that Yang is bringing the discussion to the capabilities of nuclear
technology even if I consider it a bit misguided to focus on the thorium fuel
cycle. There's a phrase in nuclear advocacy today: "Come for the thorium, stay
for the reactors"

~~~
juped
The thing I hate most in nuclear advocacy is the trope of "the new, exciting,
safe and economical nuclear reactor based on new, exciting miracle tech!".

We have amazing, safe, economical, etc. nuclear reactors. They're called
nuclear reactors, and don't need any miracle tech conjured up in some magazine
columnist's imagination.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Today's Thorium "hype" was started by a NASA tech named Kirk Sorensen. He
outwardly said nuclear needed a rebrand as early as 2008 and has kind of
doubled down on it. Like: "Hey all those problems with nuclear are solved if
you split this nucleus instead of that one". I agree with you and don't think
this is necessary.

We should just try to help people see context in the things they don't like
about nuclear. The reactor accidents we all have heard about are hard for
anyone to compare with 8 million air pollution deaths per year from
combustion. But few people know about the Banqiao dam failure that killed
100,000.

I read recently that 60% of American's think nuclear reactors contribute to
climate change, when in fact they're among the lowest carbon forms of energy
known.

It's really mostly a PR issue. Nuclear PR money is tied up in utilities which
also all run large fossil assets, so it's rare for them to talk about how low
carbon nuclear is.

~~~
Baeocystin
There's a reason we call MRI machines MRIs, and not NMRIs. Rebranding around
public perception matters, whether we like it or not.

~~~
fsh
I don't buy it. For example in Germany MRI is usually called
"Kernspintomographie" ("nuclear spin tomography") and nobody has any issue
with that.

~~~
lucb1e
And yet I can't step out my door without finding anti nuclear posters and
stickers in Germany. I've never seen this for any other topic: not Jesus, not
Snowden asylum, not je suis charlie, but nuclear power? Somehow someone
managed to setup a hugely effective brainwashing campaign for that.

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DennisP
> similar radioactivity at 100 years to uranium-plutonium fuel cycles, and
> actually has higher waste radioactivity at 100,000 years

At 100 years your radioactivity is still dominated by fission products, which
are the same in either reactor. At 100,000 years the radioactivity is
minuscule with any reactor.

But what you don't have with thorium or fast uranium reactors is a lot of
transuranic waste, like plutonium. That's the stuff that people think has to
be contained for 10,000 years. With just fission products, you're back to the
radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years. You do get a bit of very long-
lived fission product but it's not much radioactivity.

Also, the total volume of waste is about 1% as much as with conventional
reactors, since 99% of conventional waste is (mostly) U238, some leftover
U235, and transuranics. A molten salt fast reactor will fission all of that
very effectively, and a thorium reactor doesn't have the U238 or make as much
transuranic in the first place.

~~~
acidburnNSA
A few points:

* Uranium-Plutonium fuel in a closed cycle can burn all the transuranics and have very low radiotoxicity waste as well.

* Molten salt fuels are 10x less dense than typical solid fuels, implying an increase in waste volume. They're also water soluble and frequently liquid. This complicates waste disposal and transport. Not terribly, but still.

A good summary reference on radiotoxicity vs. reprocessing is:
[https://www.iaea.org/publications/8359/assessment-of-
partiti...](https://www.iaea.org/publications/8359/assessment-of-partitioning-
processes-for-transmutation-of-actinides)

~~~
Gibbon1
Something people dislike being pointed out. As far as reprocessing is
concerned the best first step in reprocessing spent fuel rods is not fuck with
them for a hundred years.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I'd go so far to say we should just dispose of it all. I used to be all in on
reprocessing the waste. Nowadays I only want to do it if it's actually cheaper
(which I don't think it will be for many decades). Nuclear has economics
issues, not uranium sustainability issues. Uranium from seawater with runoff
can power the entire planed 10x over for a few hundred million years. It's
borderline renewable. We need to be doing things that make nuclear reactors
simpler and cheaper to operate, not more complex and expensive.

Disposing of the waste from a once-through fuel cycle is totally doable. We
just have to let the world know that the Finns are doing it at the Onkalo
Repository, we can do it in WIPP, and Deep Isolation LLC is working on a
pretty slick deep borehole option.

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paulchen
The fact that we are discussing thorium here and in many other places
suddenly, proves the successful mission accomplished by Andrew Yang. Federal
bureaucrats and their aides are forced to do their homework to seriously
consider the option and answer intelligently.

~~~
hgoel
I don't think that's necessarily true, most of us on HN were probably aware of
it as an option for a while considering that the main audience of the site is
fairly "tech crazed". I wouldn't necessarily take that to mean he's succeeded
in bringing this sort of thing to the attention of the masses.

Particularly since any of the other people who pretend to care about the
climate haven't revised their weird "no nuclear" policy despite it all.

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HorstG
It is useless to make claims about a particular fuel without looking at a
concrete reactor design. Leftover isotopes for example are very dependent on
neutron flux and neutron energy as well as general breeding properties of the
reactor. This in turn decides the waste to be dealt with, proliferation risk
and possible reuse of leftover fuels from previous generation reactors (which
the submission didn't even discuss).

Also, the answers lack nuance. E.g. proliferation risk is present through
U233, however, U233 seems very difficult to deal with in bombmaking. So at
least it's less of a problem maybe.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Its easy to make bombs from U-233. In fact it is better than plutonium in some
rare circumstances. Check out the discussion and cool declassified letter from
the Livermore bomb letters here: [https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-
myths.html#myth3](https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth3)

~~~
HorstG
Yes, making the bombs themselves seems to be easy. The difficulty comes from
U232-contamination which decays into strong gamma emitters, making handling
difficult. However, there seem to be paths for the production of pure U233
from chemically separated Pa233, which one might be doing anyways in a thorium
reactor. That would mean a significantly higher proliferation risk, because
one would get pure bomb fuel form the normal operations of the reactor.
However, I don't know enough about how easy or likely that would be to judge.

But in all, you are right, I think. And maybe even more than right.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I mean to say that making clean U-233 (with very little U-232 and daughters)
is easy. Certainly assembling a bomb given pristene weapons material is
particularly easy.

I'm a reactor designer and study this kind of thing. It's really just a
question of how fast you move your Th-232 through a neutron cloud. If you move
it relatively quickly and then do your Pa separation you can get very nice
U-233 from Thorium.

The nice thing here about low-pressure fluid fuel reactors is that you can
move material in and out fairly readily.

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djohnston
im not sure it's useful to hold yang accountable for such technical minutae. i
generally believe that nuclear has an important role to play in our mitigation
of climate change, but that our bias to remember flash-point events like
chernobyl and fukushima will overshadow the far more deadly and ubiquitous
proliferation of CO2 and methane that lacks the same "pizazz"

~~~
sjwright
And it's important to remember that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has caused
one confirmed death so far. I'm not saying that it wasn't a horrific disaster,
but it's like comparing one dramatic aeroplane accident to the totality of
road vehicle deaths worldwide—one plane is newsworthy; whereas the vehicle
death toll is normalised and ignored.

Worldwide, around 50 to 500 people die in planes each year.

Worldwide, over 1 million people die in cars each year.

~~~
redis_mlc
> And it's important to remember that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has
> caused one confirmed death so far.

I wish nuclear apologists with an agenda would stop repeating this.

250,000 residents were displaced, many spending their final days in gyms and
other camps as rufugees in their own country.

An entire army will spend decades and likely trillions of dollars trying to do
something with the shattered remains of the Fukushima complex.

~~~
sjwright
Calling people who disagree with you "apologists with an agenda" isn't really
within the spirit of Hacker News, nor is it conducive to healthy discussion.

The disaster that hit Fukushima was a tsunami. Only a very small section of
the prefecture is still affected by the fallout and most of that area is for
an abundance of caution. Most of the leaked radioactive material went in the
best possible place for it—dispersed into ocean water. Ocean water already
contains naturally occurring radioactive material, in quantities many orders
of magnitude greater than humans could ever hope to disperse "by accident".

Meanwhile, the disaster being faced now could have been similar or ever
massively worse if the tsunami had hit and damaged chemical storage plants
instead.

------
Glyptodon
Several things in this FAQ are frequently contradicted, which I'm not sure
what to make of.

~~~
HorstG
They are not wrong, but also not right in all scenarios. Truth very much
depends on the reactor design. Thorium is often associated with Gen4 reactors
which are responsible for the claims of superior safety. Not much, but some of
the safety benefit comes from thorium. Similar for the claim of less waste:
Some reactors have better neutron economy, burning their own waste down to
more shortlived and therefore "better" isotopes. Or, by the same mechanism,
can utilize existing waste as fuel. Also, continuous loading and separation of
isotopes only works well with liquid fuels which is a Gen4 idea.

Thorium is more of a side-topic there.

On the economic side of whether thorium is cheaper, the submission argues in a
very underhanded manner. Yes, fuel is cheap compared to building the plant in
all cases. But the fuel cost of thorium is an order of magnitude below uranium
due to no enrichment (for light water reactors in the fuel, for heavy water
reactors of the water). And possibly (for liquid core reactors) the
unnecessary fuel elements production.

~~~
acidburnNSA
> But the fuel cost of thorium is an order of magnitude below uranium due to
> no enrichment

This turns out not to be true in practice. Uranium-238 is fertile just like
Thorium-232. To run a reactor off either of these fertile fuels requires
breeder reactor technology, which involves chemical separations and exotic
fluids. In practice, this has always been more expensive, even though the
U-238 or Th-232 is not enriched. It turns out that breeder reactor
infrastructure outweighs the cost reduction in not having to enrich.

In fact, this is the primary reason that we don't have any breeder reactors
today: it's simply cheaper to mine and enrich uranium than to reprocess. There
are political reasons as well, but the primary reason is this economics.

------
nwallin
The bit about making nuclear weapons from thorium by products is both true and
false. It is true that bucket weapons can be made from uranium 233, but not
really.

Right now, when we make nuclear weapons from plutonium 239 and uranium 235, it
looks like a regular machinist doing regular machinist things on a lathe,
except they're doing the work in a glove box. These elements, their
contaminants, and their decay products all decay by alpha decay, which is
blocked a thin layer of basically anything. As long as it doesn't physically
get inside your body, (hence the glove box) it's safe.

Uranium 233 from the thorium cycle inevitably is contaminated by uranium 232.
Uranium 232 decays quickly into thallium 208, which is a hard gamma emitter.
It takes a lot of work to get uranium 233 pure enough to make nuclear weapons
out of it. Bodies with the resources to deal with this are already
sophisticated enough to enrich uranium 235: the uranium 233 angle is
irreverent.

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teekert
How does this relate to Bill Gates plans? I saw them on Netflix recently [0]

[0]
[https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/terrapower-
china-bill-gates-trump/)

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Grue3
Yeah, let's bring down one of the few candidates who is actually treating
climate change seriously with a bunch of nitpicks. Nevermind Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren wanting to shut down the entire nuclear power fleet.

~~~
IshKebab
I don't get the nuclear fetish. Wind and solar are already far cheaper. I'm
sure you're immediately thinking "but they don't work all the time!". That's
true but we're still pretty far from having enough wind/solar to turn all
other power plants off even when it is windy and sunny.

Also the cost estimates of nuclear don't include decomissioning because nobody
has actually decomissioned a nuclear power station yet so who knows how much
it costs.

~~~
Grue3
Wind and solar are not at the scale we need to replace all the coal and gas
plants. Nobody has build enough wind and solar at this scale so we don't know
how much it costs to permanently maintain that setup (a lifespan of a solar
panel/wind turbine is pitiful compared to nuclear).

Decommissioning costs can be considered once the planet is carbon neutral,
which it is not right now. Right now the goal is to build up carbon-free
energy generation. That said, if you ask the right people [1] they probably
can give you an estimate.

[1]
[http://www.japc.co.jp/english/project/haishi/decommissioning...](http://www.japc.co.jp/english/project/haishi/decommissioning.html)

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SubiculumCode
Whether Thorium or not, geo engineering or not, the bigger point being made by
Andrew Yang is that all options should be on the table in this crisis, and
yes, I believe it is a crisis.

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cm2187
“Fact checking” seems to be a new synonym for propaganda. I am not sure what
trust I should have in fact checking from what looks like an anti-nuclear
organisation.

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deevolution
My primary concern with any for of nuclear reactors is that they make for very
juicey targets.

~~~
paulddraper
In real life, the few attacks that have been tried against nuclear power
plants have "failed" miserably. [1]

It's not terribly hard to shut one down (or at least not much harder than your
typical power plant) but extracting/releasing any radioactive material is
very, very difficult.

[1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/07/06...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/07/06/if-
nuclear-plants-are-so-vulnerable-to-terrorist-attack-why-dont-terrorists-
attack-them)

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AnnoyingSwede
I wish there was this much backlash against Donald Trumps fictional claim that
the sound of wind-turbines caused cancer, but i am assuming that this bulletin
was commissioned by someone that rather nitpick on Yang for opening a door,
than the current presidents attempt to slam working doors shut. Not to make
this political, but Yang brings a lot to the table that others ignore afraid
of being scrutinized.

~~~
fsh
This is just whataboutism. Trump's insanity doesn't justify giving other
politicians a free pass for saying incorrect things.

~~~
AnnoyingSwede
Agree, that's what it is.

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Synaesthesia
To my knowledge, the reason why Thorium reactors have never been pursued is
because there is no way to weaponise them.

I’m glad someone is talking about new possibilities of carbon free power
generation.

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formercoder
I’m quite disappointed by Yang’s false claims. I’ve come to accept him as the
truth and logic driven candidate who thinks things through. He could have
advocated his position without these statements. He should focus on Gen4.

