Norway is building thorium reactor • Hacker News Board

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#51

Post by nbashaw » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 4:22 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #49

polshaw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the t…

Don't forget to consider the cost of externalities (environmental damage, health costs), which probably roughly double the true cost of nonrenewable fuels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g... Also, as for the comments that oil is still king in terms of absolute price, keep in mind that we probably peaked around 2004: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2008_fot... In my min…

From the article:

"The four-year test at Norway’s government owned Halden reactor could help thorium inch closer to replacing uranium as a possible safer and more effective nuclear power source. Many people believe that thorium is superior because it leaves less long- lived dangerous waste, makes it far more difficult to fashion bombs, runs more efficiently, and can be made meltdown proof."

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#52

Post by lutze » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 4:40 PM UTC

arrrg wrote: post #47

billysilly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice and all, but "help reduce" doesn't really equal a "solution for waste storage", and does not change the fact that society, not the companies that built, run and extracted profits from these plants, will have to pay the costs (which we cannot even calculate as long as we don't even have a storage solution, which makes shrugging them off even more criminal -- yeah, maybe it won't be so bad, but we shrug it…

That’s kinda beside the point, you know. We already have all that waste. We already have to deal with it somehow. There is no avoiding it. So we might as well add to it.

Ah, the "in for a penny" school of thought.

A very sensible and reasonable approach to something that could affect the future of our entire species!

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#53

Post by polshaw » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 4:50 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #45

polshaw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the t…

That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are tre…

>It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for [thorium]..

Nor did i ever suggest it was! (NB: 'OTOH').

>a couple of million

..would be rather 'pissing in the ocean' though on this issue, don't you think? (and thus could be considered a waste of money)

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#54

Post by tarre » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 4:58 PM UTC

ianbooker wrote: post #17

scarmig wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many nuke advocates go much too far in the "nuclear power will solve all our problems!" That said, the strongest arguments for nuclear power has always been as part of a balanced energy diet, not as the off the shelf answer to everything. So, how do we figure out where it's appropriate and where not? Properly price carbon, and remove all distorting subsidies to all forms of energy, from fossil fuels to solar…

Dear fellow free market enthusiast, I fear it is not possible to determine a price for the storage of nuclear waste, because it needs to be taken care of so long. If one could estimate a price, I would doubt that any of todays companies companies is yet big enough to pay for it. If you look at germany for instance: We are using nuclear power since decades, in almost 20 plants. Yet there is no solution for waste stora…

I don't know about other countries, but at least in Finland nuclear power companies pay the nation annually a deposit, which is used to take care of the spent fuel and to decommission the power plants. For now there is more than 1.5 billion euros in the fund.[0] Despite this the nuclear power plants there have been an excellent investment.

As money is not a problem for seeking solutions for the final disposal of the waste, Finland is advancing in finding the solution. By now they are planning to begin burying the waste in 2020. More information can be found at: http://www.posiva.fi/en

[0] http://www.posiva.fi/en/final_disposal/total_costs_and_fundi...

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#55

Post by tarre » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 5:00 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #32

ianbooker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear fellow free market enthusiast, I fear it is not possible to determine a price for the storage of nuclear waste, because it needs to be taken care of so long. If one could estimate a price, I would doubt that any of todays companies companies is yet big enough to pay for it. If you look at germany for instance: We are using nuclear power since decades, in almost 20 plants. Yet there is no solution for waste stora…

Coal plants also produce nuclear waste. It either goes with the smoke or is filtered. What do they do with the filters though?

The activity of those filters is so low, that burying it a couple of meters into the ground works well.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#56

Post by gregsq » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 5:25 PM UTC

dthunt wrote: post #6

leeoniya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

awww, i got all excited :(

Still a step closer. I'm not a genuine nuke geek, but hopefully there are a few around who can shed some light into what sort of impact the commercial use of thorium as a fuel is on the viability of the fuel in the long-run.

In response to this, here is a summary copied directly from a reputable source. [1]

Thorium is a radioactive element similar to uranium. Formerly used to make gas mantles, it is about three times as abundant in the earth’s crust as uranium. Soil commonly contains around 6 parts per million of thorium, and some minerals contain 12% thorium oxide. Seawater contains little thorium, because thorium oxide is insoluble. Thorium can be completely burned up in simple reactors (in contrast to standard uranium reactors which use only about 1% of natural uranium). Thorium is used in nuclear reactors in India. If uranium ore runs low, thorium will probably become the dominant nuclear fuel. Thorium reactors deliver 3.6 billion kWh of heat per ton of thorium, which implies that a 1 GW reactor requires about 6 tons of thorium per year, assuming its generators are 40% efficient. Worldwide thorium re- sources are estimated to total about 6 million tons, four times more than the known reserves shown in table 24.7. As with the uranium resources, it seems plausible that these thorium resources are an underestimate, since thorium prospecting is not highly valued today. If we assume, as with ura- nium, that these resources are used up over 1000 years and shared equally among 6 billion people, we find that the “sustainable” power thus gener- ated is 4 kWh/d per person. An alternative nuclear reactor for thorium, the “energy amplifier” or “accelerator-driven system” proposed by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia and his colleagues would, they estimated, convert 6 million tons of thorium to 15 000 TWy of energy, or 60 kWh/d per person over 1000 years. Assuming conversion to electricity at 40% efficiency, this would deliver 24kWh/d per person for 1000 years. And the waste from the energy amplifier would be much less radioactive too. They argue that, in due course, many times more thorium would be economically extractable than the current 6 million tons. If their suggestion – 300 times more – is correct, then thorium and the energy amplifier could offer 120 kWh/d per person for 60 000 years.

[1] David MacKay. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#57

Post by SoftwareMaven » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #48

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium. Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all? I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I w…

Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2].

Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby. Utah doesn't really have the spare water capacity to use it as a potential energy store, either.

The point being that, as great as renewables are, without a way to cheaply store vast amounts of renewable energy or a way to shuffle energy from great distances, it isn't going to work on its own. We need a solid baseline, which, of course, is coal today, but I'd much rather keep looking for better nuclear.

There's a lot of energy in those bonds; I have a great deal of confidence we can find a way to leverage it without all of the nasty side-effect. We just need to get past the knee-jerk reaction of "nuclear is bad" and to a better place of "today's nuclear leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't mean tomorrow's will"[3].

1. http://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm

2. http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Utah/sunshine-by-month...

3. http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html - You can see that Nuclear is far less deadly than coal, but, when things go wrong, it costs a whole lot more than coal.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#58

Post by SoftwareMaven » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 5:42 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #44

jpdoctor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean Only for some definitions of clean. Forget the radiation, Thorium's toxicity profile is not pretty. Hell, the damn thing is pyrophoric. Hats off to the engineers if they can make a more sensible reactor out of it.

But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year. Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff. In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and curre…

People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#59

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 5:59 PM UTC

polshaw wrote: post #42

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the t…

> Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.

I checked some facts; 2W / m^2 for wind[0], 1000W / m^2 for nuclear[1]. Even if they didn't account for some infrastructure, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't decrease that number 500 times.

Nuclear fission is one of the most powerful energy sources (in energy per unit of mass of fuel) known to mankind, to be replaced only by fusion and annihilation. Renewables on Earth don't even begin to compare.

[0] - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_33....

[1] - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#60

Post by Symmetry » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 6:09 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #48

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium. Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all? I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I w…

Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not. That is, if the reactor starts to overheat will that make it generate more power or less. In light water reactors, such as pretty much all existing commercial reactors, you need complicated feedback systems to keep the reactor under control. And if those are damaged, as at Fukushima, you're looking at a melt down.