If you need lots of thorium you can usually find a ton of it Winterspring or the Burning Steppes!
You can find it pretty much anywhere actually. It's a by-product of many mining processes and India has literal beaches of it.
Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
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Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#12I've read somewhere that one problem with Thorium is it can easily be converted to a fissionable isotope (of Uranium?) which can be used to build bombs. So there's that.
Add a neutron to Thorium-232 and it becomes protactinium for 30 days which then decays to Uranium-233. Uranium-233 is great bomb material and perfect reactor fuel, although as mentioned it is quite hot and difficult to work with. The key with thorium reactors, is that apart from the U-233 seed to start the process of converting fertile thorium into fissile material, no more needs to be added.
Thorium is all around us. Adding a neutron to it to create uranium is no simple matter if one doesn't have a high flux neutron supply (such as a reactor).
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#13The post doesn't give a definite answer to the question in the title, but it is interesting.
It could be a plausible solution to our electricity woes to a degree. Mainly in baseload electricity supply which is about 60% of the U.S. grid. Small liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTRs) can fit on a flatbed truck and mass manufactured. The idea is that we can connect these to existing coal plant secondary systems around the country and replace the coal boilers.
Thorium is extremely abundant. We have 3000 tons of it sitting in nevada gathering dust because we have nothing better to do with it. Also, you can get an incredible amount of energy and little waste out of a liquid thorium reactor. See http://energyfromthorium.com/. That's Kirk Sorensen's blog. A NASA engineer who's really led the movement on LFTRs and got featured in Wired for it.
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#14I've read somewhere that one problem with Thorium is it can easily be converted to a fissionable isotope (of Uranium?) which can be used to build bombs. So there's that.
No. The problem is the other way around: It _can't_ easily be converted. That's why is was not investigated in the 40s and during the cold war too much: People were interested in bombs, too.
That's true. We had two reactor options during the cold war that were choices to extend our Uranium supply. One was the Fast Breeder reactor and the other was the liquid thorium reactor. My dad worked on the Fast breeder which would use liquid sodium as a coolant to allow the reactor to operate at much higher temperatures and high neutron flux so as to burn actinides more efficiently and convert uranium into plutonium to be either burned or taken out and used for weapons. Although, it's silly, American commercial fast breeders wouldn't really be used for plutonium production even if they got off the ground because U.S. regulations wouldn't allow anyone to access the fuel very easily. Unlike Chernobyl, which was a weapons/energy plant, designed for easy access to it's fuel. Hence the lack of containment which all American plants are required to have.
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#15This is a classic case of a solution to a problem that does not exist.
Firstly, Uranium is practically an insignificant cost of a nuclear power station. The price would have to go up by a factor of a 100 before it made a difference.
Secondly, the supplies of uranium are currently limited because the demand is limited. The moment the price shifts up by even a little, supply will grow because several other mining locations will become profitable.
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#16The short answer is that there are many entrenched interests who are not keen on the idea: Uranium mines, nuclear industry, weapons manufacturers, not to mention the oil, gas and coal lobbies, even the alternative energy suppliers like solar. Thorium would rain on all their parades.
The real answer is the R&D costs are not worth it because Uranium is still extreamly cheap. The fuel costs for a modern reactor are a small fraction of total cost.
Also, fosil fuels a not going to be replaced with wind, solar, fission or fusion any time soon because they are not really portable for anything smaller than a boat.
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#17If you need lots of thorium you can usually find a ton of it Winterspring or the Burning Steppes!
You can find it pretty much anywhere actually. It's a by-product of many mining processes and India has literal beaches of it.
I believe magamiako is referring to areas in World of Warcraft where thorium can be found.
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#18This is a classic case of a solution to a problem that does not exist. Firstly, Uranium is practically an insignificant cost of a nuclear power station. The price would have to go up by a factor of a 100 before it made a difference. Secondly, the supplies of uranium are currently limited because the demand is limited. The moment the price shifts up by even a little, supply will grow because several other mining locat…
We have already mined something like 100 years worth of Uranium that is just waiting around to be used in power plants. Or, if the US moved to breeder reactors we could go for something like 1000 years without mining any new uranium.
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#19This is a classic case of a solution to a problem that does not exist. Firstly, Uranium is practically an insignificant cost of a nuclear power station. The price would have to go up by a factor of a 100 before it made a difference. Secondly, the supplies of uranium are currently limited because the demand is limited. The moment the price shifts up by even a little, supply will grow because several other mining locat…
We have already mined something like 100 years worth of Uranium that is just waiting around to be used in power plants. Or, if the US moved to breeder reactors we could go for something like 1000 years without mining any new uranium.
The trouble with fast breeders is that you need a huge fissile inventory to get one started.
A study of the PRISM design, a modern fast breeder that uses integral reprocessing to reduce the inventory of plutonium that's sitting around, not fissioning, indicates that if we reprocessed all spent fuel in the U.S. today, we'd have enough Pu to power about 33 MWe worth of breeders, about 1/3 of the current fleet.
It comes down to energy vs power. "Fast" breeders can tap a huge energy resource, but they can only produce a low level of power because they tap that energy slowly. That's the whole reason they use highly reactive sodium as a coolant; to reduce fissile inventory per unit of power, you need a coolant with incredibly high heat conductivity. Lead is a much easier material to handle, but a lead-cooled fast reactor has 1/3 the power density of a sodium reactor, which means 3x the fissile inventory.
Fast breeders, therefore, can sustain energy production over a long period of time, but they can't drive a rapid expansion of nuclear energy, like the 5-fold increase we'd need to replace fossil fuels and stop global warming -- it becomes hard to justify the economics of a plutonium economy in the same way... You have to be thinking more than "seven generations" ahead to see the economic boon.
Thermal reactors effectively trade a moderator material (water, graphite, etc.) for (relatively scarce) fissile material. Thermal reactors (even today's LWR) extract 10-20x as much power from fuel than do fast reactors with less aggressive design (although the LWR extracts only 2% as much energy, in the long term, as a breeder could.)
A thermal breeder, based on thorium, could provide the best of worlds. With small inventory, it's possible to meet high power requirements, but by using abundant thorium instead of rare U-235, be able to sustain that power for thousands of years.
Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the anti-proliferation points is that U233 (which is the isotope you're thinking of) is mixed with U232, which decays to products with high gamma output, meaning that it's more dangerous to work with than the more typical fissionable materials, and much easier to detect. For a state this probably wouldn't be a significant barrier, but it's a fair point with respect to terrorist bombs. Of course, we haven't see…
From the OP: You will hear that we can’t make bombs out of U-233 because it is a virulent gamma-ray emitter. This is not true, and I find it curious that it is used as a reason. U-233 has a 158,000-year half-life. What they are referring to is the protactinium-233 contaminant, which has a 27-day half-life, beta-decaying into U-233 with gamma-ray involvement. Chemically scrub the protactinium, of course, or just wait…
No, that's wrong. The claim is that the bred U-233 will be contaminated with U-232, which is very hard to get rid of, and has the hard gamma emitter Thallium-208 in its decay chain.