
Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins in Norway - sasoon
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/160131-thorium-nuclear-reactor-trial-begins-could-provide-cleaner-safer-almost-waste-free-energy
======
Tuna-Fish
> While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is
> arguing the nastiness of plutonium.

Except everyone who knows anything about it. Plutonium is a hot topic because
it's what you need to build a nuke, but the public perception that it is a
significant as nuclear waste is simply completely misguided.

Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha
emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you. It oxidizes
easily, and it's oxides are heavy and non-soluble, so when it is released to
the environment, it just tends to fall down and stay there. There is
negligible biological uptake through eating, and while there is some uptake
through breathing, plutonium does not tend to stay airborne.

Various people have denounced environmental plutonium as something capable of
killing billions. The toxicity of plutonium in humans is not known, simply
because not enough people have died of it. There is no-one in the world who
has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body (and
that's a long and horrible story), and there were a lot of people who worked
coated in plutonium dust for a long time. Of the people who were injected with
plutonium, most died of other causes. Suffice to say, plutonium is
sufficiently non-radioactive that it's _chemical toxicity_ is considered
significant in it's lethality. Or, in other words, it's fine to consider
toxicity of environmental plutonium as you would consider lead or other heavy
metals.

To put it short, plutonium being toxic is simply not a concern as far as
nuclear waste is concerned. _If all the plutonium produced by civilian nuclear
power was pulverized and spread in populated areas, it would not make nuclear
reactors as dangerous to people as wind power._ (Somewhat ironically, because
of the thorium that is released into the environment while separating the REE
for the magnets.) Taking all the plutonium produced in a plant and dumping it
in one spot doesn't make that spot as dangerous as the ground near a typical
fuel station that was in use for the period leaded gas was used.

Nuclear waste is really bad, but that's because of _short-lived_ isotopes,
which decay more often, and thus are more radioactive, and _light_ radioactive
materials, which are often soluble in water, have high biological uptake, and
can stay in the atmosphere.

Plutonium needs to be tracked really closely, but that is not because it's
toxic, it's because it can be used to make a bomb.

The more you know.

~~~
comrade_ogilvy
The other thing about plutonium people fail to recognize is that practical
uranium civilian power reactors are pretty lousy at producing plutonium. The
proliferation risk is non-zero, but processing spent fuel is a pretty nasty
business and the amount of plutonium there is so small as to be a big expense
for the small yield.

The problem with plutonium is a properly designed _military_ reactor can take
the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate
enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices.

That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might
have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases,
their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they
are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of
uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually _use_ a
bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to
deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from
getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to
even start an attempt.

If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build
50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi
Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of
their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a
modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.

~~~
speeder
North Korea seemly can use both Plutonium and Uranium (or something else
entirely even).

South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the
entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.

North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South
Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet
South Korea knows they won't use it...

Japan on the other hand, IS kinda paranoic, in the last elections a new party
was formed, with a militaristic and nationalistic tone (including visiting
WWII shrines and reacalling WWII as the good times), and they got expressive
votes, also the current prime minister proposed heavily remilitarize Japan (to
irritation of China, and both Koreas), including scratch the current
constitution, and use a new one that follow confucionism (instead of
illuminism).

~~~
tsotha
>North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South
Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet
South Korea knows they won't use it...

No. They have nukes because they have no chance whatsoever against the South.
The North Korean army is bigger, but its equipment is antiquated, and it has
no gas or live ammunition for training. The "soldiers" spend most of their
time farming or working in factories. They don't have enough food to fight a
war.

The South Korean military budget is 20x that of the North.

------
apendleton
I'm super-interested in thorium reactor research, but this author seems to
lack even a cursory understanding of the issues at play. This reactor differs
from what lots of thorium advocates are aiming for because it's a solid-
fueled, high-pressure, water-cooled reactor, instead of the proposed LFTR
designs, which involve a reaction taking place in a liquid at very high
temperature, but at atmospheric pressure, and thus have a different set of
tradeoffs as far as efficiency, safety, proliferation resistance, etc.

This article discusses none of that, and instead suggests that this reactor is
sub-optimal because it's not a cold fusion reactor -- what? Thorium atoms are
big and somewhat-unstable, which is what you want for fission. For fusion, you
want little atoms you can ram together to make slightly-bigger little atoms.
They're totally separate.

~~~
dragontamer
You're right, the author clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. But the
story is still interesting nonetheless. :-)

Its great to hear news that Thorium is finally on the path to adoption.

~~~
tankenmate
Unfortunately the type of reactor they are building is not as safe as a LFTR,
nor does the fuel in this type of reactor last as long; the LFTR reactor is a
type of fast breeder reactor. It will still need to be fed pellets
continually. The only two material difference between this kind of reactor and
a normal boiling water reactor is that it is capable of "burning" a small
amount of uranium and/or plutonium a year (either from spent fuel or new
sources), and the spent fuel is far less radioactive after a full burn (a full
burn is not always the case). It still has most of the other safety issues of
a boiling water reactor.

~~~
DennisP
Just a nitpick, the LFTR isn't a fast reactor, though it is a breeder. Thermal
reactors breed thorium to U233 just fine. Some people have proposed fast
molten salt reactors but those designs aren't as far along.

~~~
aidenn0
Furthermore, isn't Th no better than U-238 for fast-reactors (and we have huge
quantities of U-238)?

Also, isn't the neutron economy of LFTR just slightly above unity? IIRC
chemical removal of fission byproducts was needed for a feasible Th reactor
that generates excess U-233. At least that was my recollection that one of the
potential advantages of the FLiBe design was for such very simple chemical
reprocessing.

~~~
DennisP
True, they have similar advantages, very efficient fuel utilization and little
waste.

Some of the engineers involved in molten salt reactors say "come for the
thorium, stay for the reactor." Liquid fuels offer several benefits. Removing
fission products continuously helps you achieve high burnup. There's no fuel
fabrication cost. And if the electricity cuts off, a frozen plug melts and all
the fuel dumps into a passive cooling tank, with little worry about decay heat
since you've been removing those fission products.

The neutron economy is arguably an advantage from a proliferation perspective,
since you can't remove much fissile without the reactor shutting down.

Still, a good fast reactor like the IFR has its own charms. The metal fuel is
easy to fabricate on-site, and they tested electricity cutoff and it quietly
shut down just fine, due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. And the mixed
plutonium isotopes produced by the reactor are very difficult to refine into
weapons-grade.

One advantage of the molten salt reactor is that there's nothing in the
reactor that can drive any kind of chemical explosion, like the hydrogen that
blew at Fukushima. The IFR uses molten sodium, which is pretty reactive with
air and water. That might not be too terrible to deal with but it does drive
up the cost.

Another advantage of the IFR though is that we've got a production-ready
design ready to go.

------
_delirium
Considering Norway is already a net exporter of both oil and hydroelectric
power, if they add cutting-edge nuclear to the portfolio, they will really be
all-around energy kingpins!

Incidentally, this is the project site, which the article irritatingly doesn't
bother to link:
[http://www.thorenergy.no/en.aspx](http://www.thorenergy.no/en.aspx)

~~~
blaabjerg
Norway has a disproportional chunk of the world's known Thorium reserves as
well. It seems Slartibartfast rigged the energy lottery in their favor.

------
merraksh
_(And yes, just in case you were wondering, the element thorium really is
named after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. And yes, Norse mythology
originated from Norway, where Thor Energy is based. Coincidence, I think
not!)_

The first sample of Thorium was found in Norway:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#History)

 _Morten Thrane Esmark found a black mineral on Løvøya island, Norway and gave
a sample to his father Jens Esmark, a noted mineralogist. The elder Esmark was
not able to identify it and sent a sample to Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob
Berzelius for examination in 1828. Berzelius determined that it contained a
new element, which he named thorium after Thor, the Norse god of thunder.[17]
He published his findings in 1829.[50][51][52]_

The fact that Thor Energy is Norwegian might just be due to the country being
at the same time very wealthy and environment-minded. The Norwegian reserves
of thorium are far smaller than those of other countries.

~~~
Dewie
> The fact that Thor Energy is Norwegian might just be due to the country
> being at the same time very wealthy and environment-minded. The Norwegian
> reserves of thorium are far smaller than those of other countries.

Norway is also only nr. 22 when it comes to proven oil reserves :) (dunno
about previous figures)

From the (few, probably inaccurate) estimates, Norway seems to have a sizeable
enough amount of thorium for a country of its size and population.

~~~
vehementi
What if you divide oil reserves per capita, or per area?

~~~
Dewie
That was exactly my point.

------
danmaz74
"but not in the sense that most people think of when they hear the word
thorium [...] they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium reactor"

What is this supposed to mean? Who ever talked about cold fusion thorium
reactor? Was the author thinking about toroidal fields in Tokamak (which is
very hot fusion)??

~~~
hughes
Keep in mind, this article was written by the same author as "Cold Fusion
reactor independently verified"[1]. He seems somewhat obsessed with the idea.

[1] [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/156393-cold-fusion-
reacto...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/156393-cold-fusion-reactor-
independently-verified-has-10000-times-the-energy-density-of-gas)

~~~
danmaz74
So maybe he should know that thorium has nothing to do with fusion :)

------
iSnow
Well, Germany got burned by Thorium reactors back in the 80s:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300)

Let's see if this performs any better.

~~~
pjscott
The THTR-300 ran into trouble because of operational difficulties with its
unconventional pebble-bed design. In contrast, this is a very conventional
reactor design. The difference is that the fuel is initially made of about 90%
ThO2 and 10% PuO2.

------
scrumper
This is interesting and encouraging stuff. I'm a big believer in fission power
as our best option for a clean source of huge amounts of electricity (which
we'll only need more of as electric cars start to become popular).

My main reason for commenting is to congratulate Thor Energy on coming up with
a trebly relevant name.

~~~
ownagefool
There was an enegry debate here a couple of months ago and it was suggested
that the future of enegry is everyone will have a solar panels and a battery
which is charged by the sun.

Once you think about distributed power, the need to generate mass amounts in
one place seems to be less important, though having access to cleaner and
safer ways of doing so are still good things as no doubtsome of us will still
rely on the grid sometimes.

~~~
lostlogin
Give us decent batteries and all will be well. My parents just scrapped their
solar set up. Summer days in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, provides enough
sun to have the charging switch off at about 9am, batteries full. Big Mac Pro,
lots of IT gear, coffee machine, vacuum cleaner etc all used normally. No
problem. But come winter the batteries would be perilously low, risking
damage. Days and days of torrential rain prevented any meaningful charging.
The ability to store more power economically would be so very handy. The
panels would provide vastly more power than was used during a year, but were
uneconomic due to not being able to feed it back to the grid (!!?!) and not
being able to store enough. I'd say that decent power storage was a bigger
problem than the generation.

~~~
chii
is it possible to somehow convert the power gathered during summer and spread
it out for use during winter (when there is less sun), by say, electrolysing
water to produce hydrogen and then use that as a chemical store of fuel?

~~~
Gravityloss
if you could feed it to the grid, hydro and coal and natural plants could be
throttled down or some units shut down. I don't know about nz energy mix but I
assume they have lots of hydro power. This is the natural straight forward way
if doing it, not installing heavy batteries at homes. You can simulate adding
different power sources to the grid with commercial software.

I'm sick and tired of this "but it's intermittent" canard.

------
tehabe
"[Thorium reactor] could provide cleaner, safer, almost-waste-free energy"
Always when somebody claims this, it almost never works that way.

~~~
nawitus
More like the claim will be true but ignored, atleast when it comes to cleaner
and safer.

~~~
welterde
At least pebble bed reactors (like the already mentioned THTR-300) are not
really safe. Get a bit of water into the primary cooling cycle, while the
reactor is running at capacity and you won't have that power plant for long
(happened at the AVR.. luckily it was running at lower temperature at the time
so they only had to run the reactor quite a lot reduced capacity for a year to
get the water out).

As for molten salt reactors.. still lots of problems to be solved related to
the combination of molten salt and high temperature (I recall there being an
US based molten salt reactor that got it's cooling cycle contaminated
somehow.. but can't seem to find it right now)

------
oal
Here are some slides containing more details about the Norwegian thorium
initiative and Thor Energy:
[http://www.statkraft.no/Images/Thorium%20power%20abundant%20...](http://www.statkraft.no/Images/Thorium%20power%20abundant%20climate_tcm10-1682.pdf)

------
jshen
How long can we continue to believe our energy needs can rise at the level
we've become accustomed too?

This is scary: [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-
scale-e...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-
energy/)

~~~
sliverstorm
No one with even a rudimentary understanding of exponential growth believes
energy consumption can grow exponentially forever. But the problem is self-
fixing; one day, the supply of energy will stop growing as fast as demand. The
day will come, the day will pass, and the world will adjust.

~~~
jcrites
In particular, prices will rise gradually over time, which will encourage
investment in cost-lowering research and development, as well as into energy
generation.

The market is what helps the world adjust. Unless a dramatic event causes a
significant change in prices in a short time, things will carry on just like
they always have.

~~~
jshen
Also, this idea that we don't have to worry about stuff because the market
with help us adjust is idealistic wishful thinking at best.

~~~
sliverstorm
What are you proposing is the problem? That we will foolishly bull forwards,
and accidentally violate the laws of physics and consume more energy than
there is?

~~~
chii
the fear is that we would consume too much now, and not leave enough behind to
facilitate the research/development needed to find/create better sources of
energy.

E.g., you used up the fuel in the car too fast, and can't reach the next gas
station.

------
ommunist
This may be the beginning of new era. Thorium is easy to get for developed
nations in the 3rd world.

~~~
pjg
India has been working on a Thorium reactor for some time already:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor#cite_note-4)

------
btilly
The "not prone to nuclear weapons proliferation" bit is critical, and
unfortunately wrong. As [http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-
nuclear-w...](http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-
wonder-fuel.html) points out, thorium produces protactinium-233 which can be
chemically separated out. In around a month that turns into uranium-233 at
sufficient purity to make nuclear bombs.

This process is much easier to do in secret than the centrifuges that are
required to separate isotopes of uranium. Thus thorium is worse for
proliferation, not better.

~~~
DennisP
Yes, but you have to separate the protactinium shortly after it's created, or
you end up with enough U232 to make a bomb impractical. And in a solid-fuel
reactor, what are you going to do, shut down the reactor every day so you can
melt the fuel rods, pull out the protactinium, and refabricate them?

A liquid-fueled reactor could be another matter, and we'd want to keep an eye
on them in non-nuclear states. But another factor is the breeding ratio, which
is barely over one for thermal thorium. If someone were to pull out much
fissile, the reactor would shut down, and they'd have to go begging for more
fissile to start it up again.

Another advantage for liquid fuel is very high burnup, so pretty much all
you're taking out of the reactor is fission products, not leftover fissile
that could theoretically be reprocessed.

------
kmfrk
Interesting contrast to the German reaction to Fukushima.

------
gweinberg
_At a test site in Norway, Thor Energy has successfully created a thorium
nuclear reactor — but not in the sense that most people think of when they
hear the word thorium. The Norwegians haven’t solved the energy crisis and
global warming in one fell swoop — they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium
reactor._

Who the hell thinks "cold fusion" when they hear thorium?

------
Expez
The key thing here is that these pellets are designed to work with existing
reactors. If you want to start using thorium it is a very hard sell (given the
popularity of nuclear power atm) to build new reactors/plants, but changing
the fuel in existing plants to something that can be said to be 'cleaner' or
'safer' might be doable.

------
andor
_The rod in the middle of the picture contains thorium-MOX pellets, and is
being inserted into the reactor (which is underground)._

So these guys are standing right next to a fuel rod radioactive enough to
start a nuclear chain reaction? [0] Can anybody elaborate on how dangerous
this is?

[0] only if close to lots of other fuel rods, I guess...

~~~
tarre
Unused nuclear fuel has very low radioactivity. It is the fission products,
which are the problem regarding radioactivity. Were it a used fuel bundle,
they wouldn't be standing there.

------
jackfoxy
Wait a minute...plutonium is a waste product? I thought the supply of
plutonium (that is not used in weapons) was running so low there would not be
enough to fuel deep space missions.

~~~
pjscott
The isotope of plutonium that's used in radiothermal generators for space
missions, Pu-238, is something you produce specially. Usually you get Np-237
from spent reactor fuel, and then bombard it with neutrons in a reactor
designed for producing useful isotopes.

~~~
chii
where do these neutrons come from?

------
Ashuu
I hope such technology comees to India soon!

~~~
DennisP
You may know this but India's been working on it, since it has substantial
thorium reserves and not much uranium.

~~~
pjg
Here's the link:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor#cite_note-4)

~~~
Ashuu
Yes I know that India is working hard in making thorium reactors. Also, many
of the nuclear plants in India use some percentage of thorium like 4 thorium
with 12 uranium to make a bundle. I hope thorium reactors soon. It will be
very useful.

