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Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

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Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#41

Post by sethg »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

I'm a big fan of Thorium, but I'm also a big fan of nuclear in general. It just makes sense. In fact, this is a lot like the issue of not building any oil refineries in the United States since the 1970s. While I'm sure there are good reasons for our lack of needed nuke plants, at the end of the day it looks like the system has let us all down. I hate to sound like old cranky guy again, but frack, if you really wanted…

The US government already provides massive incentives for nuclear power, but even with those incentives, nobody is building. Maybe the American nuclear industry just has such an awful record of cost overruns that investors don’t want to give them any more rope. But if the Indians can run their nuclear industry in a more competent fashion, good for them.

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#42

Post by hugh3 »

pjscott wrote: post #34
henrikschroder wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power plants can't replace oil- or coal-powered plants, because nuclear plants can't adjust output over the day to fit actual usage. Nuclear power plants are great for providing the baseline power production, but you need something adjustable to handle the morning and evening peaks, like oil or coal or wind or hydro or really big batteries. So no, you can't do the math for how many nuclear plants you would ne…

France is using some of their nuclear plants to provide peak load, and they adjust the power output of most of their plants over the day to better fit the actual usage. Their reactors are not ideal for this; there are better ways to design nuclear plants for load-following. But it can certainly be done. Alternately, you could make enough nuclear capacity to provide your peak power levels all the time , and dump exces…

Alternately, you could make enough nuclear capacity to provide your peak power levels all the time, and dump excess energy into some energy-hungry industrial process, like aluminum smelting, or synthetic fuel production, or ammonia synthesis

Heck, you don't have to do anything with it, just disconnect your turbines from your generators.

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#43

Post by pjscott »

wtallis wrote: post #35
sdurkin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both right. "The real answer is the R&D costs are not worth it because Uranium is still extreamly cheap." This answers why the market won't develop the technology on its own. But the government could still sponsor research as they did with uranium fission. "The short answer is that there are many entrenched interests who are not keen on the idea..." And this answers why the government would never fund it.

As soon as the market has to bear the cost of long-term storage of waste, they'll be interested in thorium.

That "waste" is still perfectly usable fuel. You could extract the plutonium and uranium and use that to make more fuel rods. You could burn it in fast breeder reactors, in a hypothetical future where mined uranium becomes expensive enough to warrant the use of fast breeders. Or you could just ship it to Canada, where they have heavy-water-moderated reactors that can use regular nuclear waste directly as fuel, without any chemical reprocessing.

I keep saying that nuclear waste storage shouldn't be thought of as permanent disposal. It should be thought of as keeping a reserve of nuclear fuel for the future.

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#44

Post by hugh3 »

pjscott wrote: post #32
AndrewHampton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe magamiako is referring to areas in World of Warcraft where thorium can be found.

Incidentally, comments like that are why it's so irritating to try to have discussions of thorium on Reddit. Of the people who post in those threads, a significant fraction are just there to make WoW references.

I have the same problem with discussions of Uranus.

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#45

Post by [deleted] »

terra_t wrote: post #19
Retric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#46

Post by pjscott »

hugh3 wrote: post #42
pjscott wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is using some of their nuclear plants to provide peak load, and they adjust the power output of most of their plants over the day to better fit the actual usage. Their reactors are not ideal for this; there are better ways to design nuclear plants for load-following. But it can certainly be done. Alternately, you could make enough nuclear capacity to provide your peak power levels all the time , and dump exces…

Alternately, you could make enough nuclear capacity to provide your peak power levels all the time, and dump excess energy into some energy-hungry industrial process, like aluminum smelting, or synthetic fuel production, or ammonia synthesis Heck, you don't have to do anything with it, just disconnect your turbines from your generators.

Technically, sure. Economically, since most of the cost of nuclear power is the capital cost of building the plants, you want to be running them as close to 100% capacity as you can, all the time. If you can smelt some aluminum while you're at it, that really helps.

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#47

Post by pjscott »

sethg wrote: post #41
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

I'm a big fan of Thorium, but I'm also a big fan of nuclear in general. It just makes sense. In fact, this is a lot like the issue of not building any oil refineries in the United States since the 1970s. While I'm sure there are good reasons for our lack of needed nuke plants, at the end of the day it looks like the system has let us all down. I hate to sound like old cranky guy again, but frack, if you really wanted…

The US government already provides massive incentives for nuclear power, but even with those incentives, nobody is building. Maybe the American nuclear industry just has such an awful record of cost overruns that investors don’t want to give them any more rope. But if the Indians can run their nuclear industry in a more competent fashion, good for them.

The US government has a horrendous nuclear regulatory regime. If anything, they're anti-subsidizing.

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#48

Post by cstross »

henrikschroder wrote: post #37
ColinDabritz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not solve this problem by storing energy in the longer term? It's true some 'burst' capacity is important, but can you not get a lot closer to 'average load' than the baseline by using the energy? Pumping water into a reservoir at night, and getting the power back with a small hydro plant during the day comes to mind. We smooth out an even worse problem with wind and solar, which is spiky AND out of sync with…

Here's the electricity demand curve for the UK for the last 8 days: http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Dem... Electricity demand during the night is about half of what it is during the day. If you were to have nuclear baseline production that covers peak consumption, you would have to find a way to store about 100000MWh of energy that gets produced during the night and then distribute that durin…

One of the reasons demand is light at night is that we run our central heating systems on gas -- mostly imported from Norway or parts east, these days. Per kWh, gas heating is a lot cheaper for the consumer. But if we had a serious base load nuclear infrastructure, we could provide much cheaper off-peak electricity for domestic heating, which would smooth out the demand curve significantly.

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#49

Post by cstross »

grandinj wrote: post #15

This 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…

No, there is a problem.

But the problem is political, not economic.

A uranium fuel cycle makes it relatively easy to breed plutonium or explain why you're building enrichment plants which can be used to make weapons-grade HEU. Ergo, bombs. Ergo, proliferation-policing issues.

To move the planet onto nuclear power (as a zero-carbon solution) is therefore politically unpalatable to those who enforce the current nuclear weapons oligopoly.

A Thorium economy might be manageable without making proliferation too easy, if the fuel is converted to U-233 and burned in situ. (Certainly U-233 isn't used in weapons at present as far as I know ...)

Re: Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes?

#50

Post by _delirium »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

I'm a big fan of Thorium, but I'm also a big fan of nuclear in general. It just makes sense. In fact, this is a lot like the issue of not building any oil refineries in the United States since the 1970s. While I'm sure there are good reasons for our lack of needed nuke plants, at the end of the day it looks like the system has let us all down. I hate to sound like old cranky guy again, but frack, if you really wanted…

Part of the reason for no new refineries was a long period of extremely poor profitability. Companies were actually shutting down existing refineries through much of the 1980s and 90s, amidst worries of industry-wide "excess refining capacity".
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