No Free Lunch

Exactly right. Maybe we will reach a technological state where we can all have our own complete reliable household renewable generating system and have complete sustainable energy liberty, but we aren’t there yet.

We have to learn to develop the (social and engineering) infrastructure for resilient nuclear energy.

Who’s going to freak out? This anti-nuker is an antinuker for all the reasons you just gave. And besides, what’s the point of buying 20 years time? What do you think will happen in those 20 years? We’ve had 40 years since the Arab embargo. Have we done anything about weaning ourselves off oil, besides switching over to SUVs so that the oil will run out faster? Have we done anything about overpopulation in the last 2 generations besides tripling the world population?

You’re just talking about 20 years extra of nukes and fossil fuel burning time that will be wasted. Might as well face the music 20 years earlier. Then there will be that much less mess to clean up when the lights come back up.

The light will not come back up.

Think for a bit about the last four thousand years. Technology versus the resources it consumed.

If we crash, the rungs of the tech ladder we climbed 300 years ago: wood, easily refined copper and iron ores, almost everything else that the seventeenth century version of technical civilization consumed, will be either gone or unusable.

So we will never be able to ascend that ladder a second time.

Think about agricultural civilization pre-1750. Or, most places, pre-1900. Built on either serfdom or outright slavery because that was what efficient food production required.

If you think the gulf between classes is outrageous now, just try things your way and wait a couple of generations. The underclass will have no rights whatsoever, and the upperclass will consume them, perhaps almost literally.

We cannot afford to fuck this technical civilization up. We will never have a second chance.

And your grandchildren will be literal rightless slaves, breaking themselves behind plows sunup to dusk every day of their miserable unlettered ignorant existence, burned out at 30 and dead by 50.

I’ve taken to calling it “nuclear deadlock” and “solar austerity.”

I like some of the links Digby has dug up. There is reason to believe that, in the long term, you hominds do not need either fossil fuel or nuclear energy. But…HOW DO YOU GET THERE? Seriously, you-folk can’t even shut down your authoritarians. And somehow you are to transform the world’s economy? I think you’d better start praying, folks. You need a miracle; a change in your hearts.

Croak!

“If you downshift now, which hundreds of millions of people are going to die?”

I’d guess almost all of them/us. But I doubt the decision will be left to us.

Agree 100% on nuclear energy. I also think we should be throwing everything we have into basic physics research, in hopes of eventually being able to to controlled fusion and matter-antimatter. That would make the whole solar line of research moot. But we choose lawyers and sophists as our leaders, who preach “science education” but know nothing of it, nor care to.

Speaking of solar, do we have evidence one way or the other of how many people the geo-thermal energy sources could support in the best-case scenario? Even if we could convert 100% of the sun’s energy to a usable form, how much of the earth’s surface would we need to cover in solar panels to support a 6+ billion population? Are there even enough raw materials to do it?

“Contrary to what many on the left think, widescale solar is still not feasible, the production of large solar panels produces huge amounts of toxic byproducts.”

Glad you see it as a political/economic problem, not a technical/nuclear one. But you are calling for a technical solution to what you point out is not a scientific trouble.

While there are many drawbacks and pain involved in change, of any kind – but if, as you illustrate, 1/10 of the resources were spent in a search for alternative energy sources (or even better – ways to reduce energy consumption) than have been spent, as you say, pouring cement, this pain would be far less than now being experienced in Japan. U-238 has a half life of 80 million years, what is the half life of those toxic elements of solar panels?

You are correct – there is no free lunch, but it becoming clear that dinner cooked on a nuclear stove is expensive indeed – prohibitively so.

No one I know, not the most adamantly opposed to nukes, is suggesting that they all be immediately shut down – and damn the consequences … and some reactors are beneficial – like the truncated MAPLE reactors in Chalk River that are designed to produce medical isotopes.

As they age and become un-operable (more so than now) shut them down – with no new ones build in the last 20 years or so, it will not be long.

[T]his is going to lead to a huge round of the stupids. Contrary to what many on the left think, widescale solar is still not feasible, the production of large solar panels produces huge amounts of toxic byproducts. So if Japan wants to go off nukes, they would most likely go off them to coal, and if you replace all those nukes with that much coal, it’s a complete environmental and health disaster, and a massive downshift in standard of living, to boot.

False choice. No one thing is going to replace nuclear power, or make up our other energy deficits. Nuclear power won’t be sufficient to meet all electrical energy needs, for that matter. On the West Coast, we’ve largely avoided the need for new power plants despite a rapidly expanding population. In contrast, there are places on the East Coast that still need more energy. The difference is that in the West, states learned to emphasize conservation.

Nor is all solar energy derived from semiconductors. Solar can be used to heat water, which is one of the primary uses for electricity in homes.

None of those things will get us all the power we need, either, but if we or Japan had been doing everything we could to conserve and to find alternate sources of energy, we and they would both be in a lot better shape right now. Instead, those priorities seem to have been right up there with making sure the nuke plants were safe.

You know, the earth puts out a whole shitload of power, most of which it collects directly from the sun to keep its core active. If we can’t find some way to make use of that that goes beyond putting up a few windmills and some waterwheels, then we deserve to go extinct because we are completely fucking retarded.

If you downshift now, which hundreds of millions of people are going to die?

Humankind will not downshift, it will proceed full steam ahead. That’s what has happened, what is happening and what will happen, but Humankind has limits, even though it believes it does not. Humankind is fast approaching those limits…in fact, it’s going to smash right into those limits, and not only will an involuntary downshift take place, but the vehicle humankind is driving will be obliterated and all its inhabitants.

Such is the web that humankind has woven. Here’s our situation, metaphorically.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAULUqmwN04&feature=related

How’s about we quit subsidizing energy in all of its forms and see what happens? And that especially includes environmental damage.

Let electricity hit $0.30/kw & higher and watch the shelves empty of caulk & power strips. Most people can decrease household/business consumption by 25% easy with about $100.00 one time cost and an easy weekend.

Remember that a nuclear power plant simply uses a fission reaction to heat water into steam that spins a turbine. It’s not worlds apart from solar heat power plants.

I believe that Ian is right. Nuclear power can be done safely, but its largely a matter of design choices. Our current societies are largely incapable of meeting those design criteria due to corruption, corner-cutting, etc.

I think we also suffer from a failure of imagination. The only two major visions for the future of humanity on Earth that I encounter from people are:

(1) Austerity, budget cuts, and increasing servitude in both public and private life imposed from the top via governmental and economic authoritarians because we have been profligate and living beyond our means and must be disciplined–and this course of action is determined to be valid according to a hugely subjective set of rules we have developed for our monetary and economic systems. This view considers money and debt to be the problem and emphasizes the immorality of spending too much. It seeks to keep people in economic slavery to cram down on our resource consumption in order to solve our real (physical) problems.

(2) Voluntary reductions in material wealth, standards of living, and technological progress that are justified because we have been profligate and living beyond our means and must engage in self-sacrifice to atone for our errors–and this is determined to be valid according to hugely subjective definitions of what is a “sustainable” human life. This view considers resources and human population to be the major variables of concern and advocates that they be brought into alignment, usually through a reduction of population or a reduction in the standard of living. It advocates keeping people in a form of resource slavery (current generation decides to reduce the wealth of future generations) to solve our real problems.

I believe these two solutions are indistinguishable in the long run (either one eventually bleeds into the other) and, frankly, both of them suck. Their wide adoption will bring us into a new Dark Age.

(Note: There’s also a third view (3) that there are no problems, but that’s getting rarer these days.)

Some threads deserve a picture, because a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a picture worthy of this thread.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.politicsdaily.com/media/2010/02/three-mile-island-jill-lawrence-picnic-345w.jpg

Aren’t the lunchers positively radiant?

HumbleAuthor has it right. People didn’t used to heat houses – they heated rooms. Start charging what it is worth with no chance of recourse and watch us drop consumption 30% in 36 months. I know dozens of people with a house 30% too large so that their spawn can come visit once or twice a year for 4 days. The empty wing of the houses are still conditioned year ’round.

Here in south central Louisiana I can see from my window a newly-minted limestone side road being populated with the lowest quality mobile homes on the market. The homeowners are orienting their trailers with the long sides east-west. There is not a tree in sight. Their heating and cooling bills will easily be twice what they would have been if these trailers had been oriented 90 degrees from present. Bet if they were getting hit with $1200.00/month bills in August as opposed to $600.00 bills they would learn real fast what people knew 40 years ago.

Not only does honest pricing buy us some breathing room but it sets the agenda.

HumbleAuthor writes:

Talk about a false choice? Build more plants or society fails. No, that’s not it. Replace your bulbs with incandescent globes, which use 75% less electricity than regular lights and last longer. That’s just one simple measure, and it would lower household consumption considerably.

I think you mean to “replace your [incandescent] bulbs with compact flourescents”. To my way of thinking, any light that’s in or near the ceiling should be as efficient as possible if you live where I do, and every light should be as efficient as possible if you’re using air conditioning.

Every watt of power use that’s saved results in something like one and a half to two watts of electricity production. It also saves considerably more than two watts’ worth of whatever energy you use to generate that power. That in itself makes conservation more efficient than production.

I’m sure we’ll need more production. Populations are growing just about everywhere. But we went through tremendous population growth up here in the Northwest without putting more power plants online. We’ve seemingly reached the end of that string now, with the new wind farms and the upgrades at Grand Coulee, but we were going to build eight nuke plants when I first moved into this area in the late ’70s. Instead, we built two and conserved enough to do without the rest.

If we can do that here, you can do that just about anywhere else.

Re: My last comment – that was four plants out of five that we did without here. Oops. Or, should I say, W[oo]PPS.

Ian Welsh writes:

Nor do Japanese have large inefficient homes situated the wrong way, they pretty much don’t even use air conditioning most of the time in the very hot summers.

Nor do they have a smart electrical grid, energy self-sufficient buildings, or any one of a number of other innovations that have become viable (or at least, potentially viable) since then. According to that link you provided, they stopped subsidizing solar energy for homeowners back in 2006. Without that subsidy, it’s tough for folks to save up that much money to invest in one – they cost about as much as a motorcycle or a car, and it takes decades before they’ve paid for themselves. Just like conservation, energy generated where it’s needed has a built-in efficiency gain, because it doesn’t have to be delivered.

It’s going to take more than doing one thing. There are a lot of different things that have to be done, some big, some small.

I’m sure they’ve wrung just about all the inefficiency out of their system in the old way. But, as that link noted, it’s hard to change a policy when it’s been successful. That’s the challenge that they’ll have to face.

No, ks, what I was saying was that we didn’t build the plants, and used conservation instead. I didn’t attempt to explain why the plants weren’t built. They were, in fact, terminated because of the cost overruns.

Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I was trying to simplify the narrative, and the cost overruns seemed somewhat irrelevant to the idea that we learned to get along without them.

Ok Cujo, I now see what you’re saying.

Japan is a prime example of everything’s that’s wrong with this system. There are approximately 100 million people situated on that small Island chain living a highly materialistic lifestyle of consumerism. Many of its natural resources have to be imported since they are not indigenous to the Island country.

Oh, and Lovelock’s a hypocritical jackass. I can’t believe someone pointed out, as though it was a positive thing, that Lovelock thinks Nuclear is the way to go. If you know anything about Lovelock, he’s a Malthusian and believes we are already too far gone, so it’s ironically humorous that someone’s using him to support their argument for Nuclear.

Until we start thinking about how we consume energy–housing and transportation–I agree with Ian: nuclear is the second best option. What I haven’t heard anyone address (besides here) is what we do in the meantime if we pull our nuclear reactors offline. Magical Gerbils on Perpetual Treadmills?

Gonna need lots of gerbils…

I think nuclear power can be safer, and I think other cultures – quite possibly the Japanese – will be the ones to lead the way. With 55 reactors and 30 percent of their electricity supplied this way, and given that seismology augurs no abatement of earthquakes in the future, the Japanese have every incentive to make things safer.

Not to discount the immense tragedy that’s unfolded, but it often takes engineering disasters, often on a huge scale, for people to learn what needs to go into version 2.0 of any technology, and get motivated to upgrade. The GE reactors at Fukushima date from the 1960s.

Agree with those commenters upstream who state that there is no silver bullet – it’s going to take a variety of solutions, including reduced consumption, to make the transition from the current energy economy to the next one.

Intellectually, I’d have to admit that there might be such a thing as safe nuclear power, but the context for the existence of such a thing would be so far away from what we’re living in right now that I think an admission like that only serves as a distraction to placate ourselves with.

Ran Prieur said it well:

Why do geeks love nuclear power? More precisely, using Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, why do people with high logical-mathematical intelligence like nuclear power so much more than people with high intelligence in other areas? Framed this way, it’s an easy question. In the world of logic and numbers and predictable machines, nuclear power is totally safe. Chernobyl doesn’t count because, for political reasons, the plant was not designed, regulated, or run correctly. Fukushima doesn’t count because, for political reasons, the plant was not built to withstand an 8.9 earthquake and tsunami. Nuclear power would be perfect if only you stinky primates would obey our beautiful science!

He also links to a very good piece by Sharon Astyk, about planning for failure.

@Lex:
I believe that solar is facing a peak materials problem with regard to selenium as a vital and very limited component. However this idea is sitting in the back of my head with no citation tag on it, so… grain of salt.

But the bigger issue about environmentally derived power sources (which we would eventually run into if we ramped up production on that infrastructure) is that every region from which we could draw renewable, environmentally produced power is already using that power for its own purposes – to produce the environment! Drawing power from the wind requires you to reduce the speed of the wind. It’s a tiny fraction of the wind right now. Drawing your power from the sun requires you to reduce the amount of sunlight going towards every other end that sunlight goes towards. Again, currently a tiny fraction. But take the long, sci-fi view and you’ll be able to envision a world in which every unit of power produced by the planet is captured for human use. And that is precisely the end we’d be aiming at once we head down that road. What is more important, sunlight you can actually walk around in or the energy that sunlight could produce? Because in our current society, the answer is the latter, and in the long run this society would have us all under artificial lighting indoors all the time while all the actual sunlight went into photovoltaics powering our fluorescent lighting because it would be more efficient.

It doesn’t matter how green the technology is, how safe the plants or renewable the source. You can’t solve an energy problem in a society whose primary goal is to consume energy without limitation. There can be no such thing as a solution for a people who will not live responsibly. Until the cultural mindset is changed, where the energy comes from is irrelevant.

I have a hunch those who declare nuclear power a must for now are wrong or very, very close to being wrong. I have friends and neighbors living entirely off the grid now and I can say I am constantly amazed at the “electric” quality of lifestyle they have. By any measure they have very nice homes, very comfortable with nearly all the gadgets you can name. They even have a well (which serves three houses with normal good pressure) which runs on one solar panel and a couple batteries in case of extended dark periods. Sure cooking and refrigeration are propane, they don’t own a microwave and AC is the one luxury they don’t have. But I suspect remedy’s for that are near if not already possible. India is now manufacturing air-compressed powered cars which also have AC. Just a mater of time before something like compressed air cools dwellings.

WHen one begins to dig and find the fact Poke Berry dye can be grown everywhere, used to make solar panels… the argument that solar must be toxic too, falls flat quickly. Poke Berry is about as hearty a weed as there is…. organic solar is here now. It will revolutionize third world countries, it should revolutionize the rest of us before we join them at the bottom…. or fry ourselves all for naught.

“Why do geeks love nuclear power? More precisely, using Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, why do people with high logical-mathematical intelligence like nuclear power so much more than people with high intelligence in other areas? Framed this way, it’s an easy question. In the world of logic and numbers and predictable machines, nuclear power is totally safe. Chernobyl doesn’t count because, for political reasons, the plant was not designed, regulated, or run correctly. Fukushima doesn’t count because, for political reasons, the plant was not built to withstand an 8.9 earthquake and tsunami. Nuclear power would be perfect if only you stinky primates would obey our beautiful science!”

I’m sorry but that’s a ridiculous quote. It’s a just a snide attack. “…love nuclear power…totally safe….perfect…” what nonsense.

Still have a hard time understanding why my wife and I have a perfectly comfortable lifestyle with all of the electrical stuff we can use and run a home business. We use an average of 4.5 to 5.0KW/hr a day. My friends down the road have roughly the same lifestyle except they are not home nearly as much. They use on average about 35KW/hr per day per household.

Our clothes are just a clean, our computers are on at least 14hr/day X 2, the full size Kenmore ‘fridge works great, our water pressure is same or higher, …

If most people would perform a very simple thumbnail energy audit they’d find up to a third is simply wasted and could be conserved for about $100.00 one time cost and an easy weekend – no effort required and no lifestyle hit. The second third is more difficult and pricier. Chipping away at what remains is admittedly more difficult. A Kill-A-Watt can be had for less than $20.00 and often borrowed free from many libraries.

I have a very hard time accepting anybody as an energy expert who is clueless on personal use. No different than accepting organic gardening advice from someone who has read about it but never done it.

Japan earthquake: Japan warned over nuclear plants, WikiLeaks cables show
Japan was warned more than two years ago by the international nuclear watchdog that its nuclear power plants were not capable of withstanding powerful earthquakes, leaked diplomatic cables reveal.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8384059/Japan-earthquake-Japan-warned-over-nuclear-plants-WikiLeaks-cables-show.html

The sun will kindly send us, free of charge, 2.7 yottaJoules of energy. Every year. For the next 4 to 5 billion years.

The energy density sucks though. Last I checked a CSP facility in a favourable locale generates roughly 50W/m2 of reflector surface.

A 1999 Cornell University study put the earth’s optimal population at about two billion:

“Democratically determined population-control practices and sound resource-management policies could have the planet’s 2 billion people thriving in harmony with the environment. Lacking these approaches … 12 billon miserable humans will suffer a difficult life on Earth by the year 2100.’”
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Sept99/sustainable_life.hrs.html

Enter poleberry juice!

A few years ago, a scientist was a guest on The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, the NYC public radio station, who said that if every available roof surface in NYC were outfitted with the then relatively inefficient solar panels that not only would they supply all the electricity needed by NYC but would also supply the needs of NYC’s exurbia areas. That’s a lot of electricity.

I’ve tried to find this program in WNYC’s archives, to no avail. I wrote an email and never got an answer. I would love it if any readers here heard that program, especially if they remember more of the content.

But, to the point, scruff says using sunlight would remove that energy from the environment. However, if I understand things correctly, using the sunlight hitting rooftops would result mostly in less heat buildup on the roofs and perhaps the floor just below. In warm weather this would be beneficial, but there might be some lower heat retention in cold weather. On the whole, however, I don’t see a downside…. Other than 1) cost and 2) persuading our private property society to agree to sharing their rooftops.

Lambert at Corrente posted a Qhick Hit about using pokeberry juice dye to improve efficiency of solar collectors.

With their spin-off company FiberCell Inc., Wake Forest is now developing these fiber-based solar cells for the commercial market.

So how does a fiber-based solar cell work?
Made of millions of tiny, plastic cylinders or fibers that trap sunlight until it is absorbed, this configuration means that a fiber-based cell can collect light at any angle, from sunrise to sunset because there is much more surface area available.

To manufacture these highly-efficient ‘hybrid’ cells, the plastic fibers are stamped onto plastic sheets and the absorber dye (this is where cheap and locally-grown pokeberries come in) is sprayed on. The sheets are flexible, which means that manufacturers can make them and ship them at a low cost to developing countries. Once there, local factories can spray the absorbent pokeberry dye on the cells.

Sounds pretty exciting, but I’m not sure the article covers all the important materials needed for these flexible plastic panels.

Looking at the production company’s web site, it appears more than plastic is indeed involved….

I do however have the pokeberries right on my little lot — and they’re hard to get rid of, which I found to my dismay as I let a couple mature and go to seed before I knew what they were. The berries are striking.

Sorry Ian, but what you say about the reactors not being built
and tested is just wrong. The power station was designed to
resist the maximum known earthquake in the area and it did
resist earlier to something three times as powerful. There is
no way to design for a 1/10000 yr event like this one, the strongest
earthquake and tsunami to hit Japan in history and the 4th
largest earthquake on record !

Even then, the station passed with flying colors. The problems
we are having are due to the fact that the devastation in the
surroundings prevented help to be sent until now (e.g.,
connecting to power lines, emergency generators). In
a more normal accident, hundreds of diesel carts or
fire trucks would have been available within hours. Here
all emergency systems failed, plus no help was available
for days. The station was left to fend for itself in a high
emergency situation. Despite that, the radioactivity release
is in the TMI range (a level 6 accident would be Chelyabinsk,
with 80 tons of fissile material being spread in the atmosphere).

Now that a power line has reached the station the situation will
quickly improve. Simply restarting the passive cooling units
and the SFP pumps will quickly bring the reactors to cold shutdown
and safe status. Thanks to the rapid decay of the power output,
every hour that passes decreases the risk.

Maybe…the way to proceed is for Japan to do whatever it can to get going again in the short term, and make a crash project of sustainability?

In my other life, I’m an alternative energy researcher (daylighting) and, still, talk of just stopping the use of non-sustainable technologies gives me the grue. We have some very good technology, yes. But we aren’t ready to deploy them to replace all existing systems in a whole modern economy, and if we just stop using the systems have without replacements ready to hand, there will be vast human misery. In particular: (1) Photovoltaics are not the most best way of using solar energy for many purposes. (2) We are an urban world; a few people can live “off the grid,” but not whole cities. The attempt to force our populations to do would lead to mass death. (3) Our agriculture depends on both outside energy and chemical feedstocks from petroleum. (4) Sustainable energy for transportation has barely been addressed. (5) etc, etc, etc.

However, if you hominds want to feed us corvids…

Ian,

I’ve been offline for a week…great post!

–“I know a lot of my readers aren’t going to like this, and the anti-nukers are going to freak out in the comments thread, but this is where we are.” —

Whatever their faults, you were clearly wrong about your opponents’ hysterical tendencies, Ian.

How many of you here, let me see a show of hands, are willing to volunteer to fly to Fukishima and lend a helping hand in stabilizing the situation, if it can be stabilized at this point by man-made forces, with the caveat that you are most certainly sacrificing your lives? No hands. That’s what I thought, and yet you’re asking some poor Japanese slobs to do that for you, because let’s face it, this is a global catastrophe, and you’re asking that some poor slobs do it in the future, as well, because you have said you support nuclear as a way to a greener future. Oh yeah, sure, you’ve levied your support with all kinds of disclaimers to protect your moral selves in the event of an “I told you so” moment, but just like collateral damage in war, you throw your support behind something you know this system will handle unwisely, and therefore, you immorally approve of, at least tacitly, the catastrophes unfolding now, and to unfold, in regards to nuclear power.

Fuck, dude, i’d do it and i don’t even necessarily support nuclear energy. Of course, given that my government pulled its people far away because of the threat even though the Japanese are supposed to be our allies and we absolutely must keep tens of thousands of troops on their territory i’m not exactly sure what your point is.

Do i want to sacrifice myself for a corrupt company and a pretty corrupt government. No, but maybe that’s my duty since it was my country that built the corrupt government and calls it a shining beacon of democracy…except when the people democratically decide to ask us to leave and then it’s time to shut the fuck up and sit down like a good little client.

So again, i’m not sure what your point is or why you’re asking for a show of hands on the internet except to make a rhetorical point that doesn’t make any sense.

Oh, wait, i get it. Like so many others on the left, you want to leverage the fear generated by a tragedy for political ends. Now tell me how that’s significantly different than what Bush did after 9/11. Tell me how the left has a monopoly on rationality. Tell me how it’s not distasteful at best and disingenuous to its core.

I wonder if the Meiji were either great believers in competition by having two compete for dominance (resulting in a stand-off) or if they were great believers in Solomonic-like compromise?

Once again, to make nuclear energy work:

http://news.change.org/stories/thorium-nuclear-energys-clean-little-secret

Here, some folks intelligently discuss real solutions…

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971

Yes, S. Brennan, that was an intelligent discussion, especially this lifted comment, which pretty much underscores the issue.

dohboi on January 19, 2009 – 7:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

If this isn’t a moment for general reflection on such issues, I don’t know what would be.

By the way, did they ever hear back from Obama and Co.? I’m betting they didn’t. Case in point.

The first nuclear era was dominated by uranium technology, a technology that was derived from military applications, and carried with it, rightly or wrongly, the taint of association with nuclear weapons. As it turned out, there was far more uranium available than Fermi or Wigner had originally feared, but other rationales propelled scientific interest in developing thorium fuel cycle reactors. First, Pu-239 was not a good fuel for most reactors. It failed to fission 1/3 of the time when it absorbed a neutron in a conventional Light Water Reactor (LWR). This led to the most difficult part of the problem of nuclear waste. Plutonium made excellent fuel for fast neutron reactors, but the fast neutron reactor that Fermi liked used dangerous liquid sodium as its coolant, and would pose a developmental challenge of enormous proportions.

Advocates of the thorium fuel cycle point to its numerous advantages over the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle. B.D. Kuz’minov, and V.N. Manokhin, of the Russian Federation State Science Centre, Institute of Physics and Power Engineering at Obninsk, write:

Adoption of the thorium fuel cycle would offer the following advantages:

– Increased nuclear fuel resources thanks to the production of 233U from 232Th;

– Significant reduction in demand for the enriched isotope 235U;

– Very low (compared with the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle) production of long-lived radiotoxic wastes, including transuraniums, plutonium and transplutoniums;

– Possibility of accelerating the burnup of plutonium without the need for recycling, i.e. rapid reduction of existing plutonium stocks;

– Higher fuel burnup than in the uranium-plutonium cycle;

– Low excess reactivity of the core with thorium-based fuel, and more favourable temperature and void reactivity coefficients; . . .

Thorium could replace U-238 in conventional LWRs, and could be used to breed new nuclear fuel in specially modified LWRs. This technology was successfully tested in the Shippingport reactor during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

WASH-1097 remains a good source of information on the thorium fuel cycle. In fact, some major recent studies of the thorium fuel cycle rely heavily on WASH-1097. A recent IAEA report on Thorium appears to have been prepared without overt reliance on WASH-1097.

One of the first things physicists discovered about chain reactions was that slowing the neutrons involved in the process down, promoted the chain reaction. Kirk Sorensen discusses slow or thermal neutrons in one of his early posts.

Under low energy neutron conditions, Th232 can be efficiently converted to U233. The conversion process works like this. Th232 absorbs a neutron and emits a beta ray. A neutron switches to being a proton and the atom is transformed into Protactinium 233. After a period averaging a little less than a month, Pa 233 emits a second beta ray and is transformed into U233. U233 is fissionable, and is a very good reactor fuel. When a U233 atom encounters a low energy neutron, chances are 9 out of 10 that it will fission.

Since U233 produces an average of 2.4 neutrons every time it fissions, this means that each neutron that strikes U233 produces an average of 2.16 new neutrons. If you carefully control those neutrons, one neutron will continue the chain reaction. That leaves an average of 1.16 neutrons to generate new fuel.

Unfortunately the fuel generation process cannot work with 100% efficiency. The leftover U-234 that was produced when U-233 absorbed a neutron and did not fission will sometimes absorb another neutron and become U-235. Xenon-135, an isotope that that is often produced after U-233 splits, is far more likely to capture neutrons than U233 or Th232. This makes Xenon-135 a fission poison. Because Xenon in a reactor builds up during a chain reaction, it tends to slow the nuclear process as the chain reaction continues. The presence of Xenon creates a control problem inside a reactor. Xenon also steals neutrons needed for the generation of new fuel.

In conventional reactors that use solid fuel, Xenon is trapped inside the fuel, but in a fluid fuel Xenon is easy to remove because it is what is called a noble gas. A noble gas does not bond chemically with other substances, and can be bubbled out of fluids where it has been trapped. Getting Xenon 135 out of a reactor core makes generating new U233 from Th232 a whole lot easier.

It is possible to bring about 1.08 neutrons into the thorium change process for every U-233 atom that splits. This means that reactors that use a thorium fuel cycle are not going to produce an excess of U-233, but if carefully designed, they can produce enough U233 that burnt U233 can be easily replaced. Thus a well designed thorium cycle reactor will generate its own fuel indefinitely.

Research continues on a thorium cycle LWR fuel that would allow for the breeding of thorium in LWRs. There is however a problem which makes the LWR a less than ideal breeding environment for thorium. Elisabeth Huffer, Hervé Nifenecker, and Sylvain David note:

Fission products are much more efficient in poisoning slow neutron reactors than fast neutron reactors. Thus, to maintain a low doubling time, neutron capture in the fission products and other elements of the structure and coolant have to be minimized.

India has only a small uranium supply, but an enormous thorium reserve. Millions of tons of thorium ore lie on the surface of Indian beaches, waiting to be scooped up by front loaders and hauled away to potential thorium reactors for a song. (For those of you who are interested in the EROEI concept, the EROEI for the recovery of thorium from Indian beaches would be almost unbelievably high, and the energy extracted could power the Indian economy for thousands of years, potentially making India the richest nation in the world.)

India has for 50 years been following a plan to gradually switch from uranium to thorium cycle reactors. That plan is expected to finally come to fruition by the end of the next decade. At that point India will begin the rapid construction of a fleet of thorium fuel cycle reactors.

A commercial business, Thorium Power, Limited, continues research based on the Shippingport Reactor experiment. Thorium Power plans to offer a thorium cycle based nuclear fuel with a starting charge of enriched U-235 for modified LWRs. Thorium Power has sponsored Throium fuel research at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, and a Russian VVER has been used to conduct thorium cycle fuel experiments.

Research on thorium cycle liquid fuel reactors is ongoing world-wide. The best-known effort is being performed in Grenoble, France at the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie. The Reactor Physics Group there is the only one in the world that has the resources and backing needed to actually develop a fluid core thorium cycle reactor that can be commercialized. In terms of organization size, the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor research group is much smaller than would be required to sustain a full-scale rapid development of thorium cycle reactor technology. The LPSC group thus is working in a business as usual time frame, and has no urgent motivation to do otherwise. After all, 80% of French electricity already comes from nuclear power plants.

Thorium fuel cycle research is also being carried on in the Netherlands, Japan, the Czech Republic. There is also presently a small-scale effort in the United States.

Thorium is extremely abundant in the earth’s crust, which appears to contain somewhere around 120 trillion tons of it. In addition to 12% thorium monazite sands, found on Indian beaches and in other places, economically recoverable thorium is found virtually everywhere. For example, large-scale recovery of thorium from granite rocks is economically feasible with a very favorable EROEI. Significant recoverable amounts of thorium are present in mine tailings. These include the tailings of ancient tin mines, rare earth mine tailings, phosphate mine tailings and uranium mine tailings. In addition to the thorium present in mine tailings and in surface monazite sands, burning coal at the average 1000 MWe power plant produces about 13 tons of thorium per year. That thorium is recoverable from the power plant’s waste ash pile.

One ton of thorium will produce nearly 1 GW of electricity for a year in an efficient thorium cycle reactor. Thus current coal energy technology throws away over 10 times the energy it produces as electricity. This is not the result of poor thermodynamic efficiency; it is the result of a failure to recognize and use the energy value of thorium. The amount of thorium present in surface mining coal waste is enormous and would provide all the power human society needs for thousands of years, without resorting to any special mining for thorium, or the use of any other form or energy recovery.

Little attention is paid to the presence of thorium in mine tailings. In fact it would largely be passed over in silence except that radioactive gases from thorium are a health hazard for miners and ore processing workers.

Thorium is present in phosphate fertilizers because fertilizer manufactures do not wish to pay the recovery price prior to distribution. Gypsum present in phosphate tailings is unusable in construction because of the presence of radioactive gasses associated with the thorium that is also present in the gypsum. Finally organic farmers use phosphate tailings to enrich their soil. This has the unfortunate side effect of releasing thorium into surface and subsurface waters, as well as leading to the potential contamination of organic crops with thorium and its various radioactive daughter products. Thus the waste of thorium present in phosphate tailings has environmental consequences.

The world’s real thorium reserve is enormous, but also hugely underestimated. For example the USGS reports that the United States has a thorium reserve of 160,000 tons, with another 300,000 tons of possible thorium reserve. But Alex Gabbard estimates a reserve of over 300,000 tons of recoverable thorium in coal ash associated with power production in the United States alone.

In 1969, WASH-1097 noted a report that had presented to President Johnson that estimated the United States thorium reserve at 3 billion tons that could be recovered for the price of $500 a pound – perhaps $3000 today. Lest this sound like an enormous amount of money to pay for thorium, consider that one pound of thorium contains the energy equivalent of 20 tons of coal, which would sell on the spot market for in mid-January for around $1500. The price of coal has been somewhat depressed by the economic down turn. Last year coal sold on the spot market for as much as $300 a ton, yielding a price for 20 tons of coal of $6000. How long would 3 billion tons last the United States? If all of the energy used in the United States were derived from thorium for the next two million years, there would be still several hundred thousand years of thorium left that could be recovered for the equivalent of $3000 a pound in January 2009 dollars.

Nor would exhausting the USAEC’s 1969 estimated thorium reserve exhaust the American thorium supply. Even at average concentrations in the earth’s rocks, thorium can be recovered with a good EROEI, without making the cost of electricity impossibly expensive.

I encourage everyone to review the comments to S. Brennan’s linked article. It’s the most intelligent discussion about this issue I have seen anywhere. Some absolutely superb comments. I’m sure S. Brennan didn’t realize the enlightened comment discussion came with his Thorium Silver Bullet article, but that’s what makes serendipity so sweet, afterall.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

An old idea in nuclear power gets reexamined

Mighty thorium – The nearly perfect energy source nobody has heard of

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/science/stories/2010/03/07/thorium-art-gc67nvgb-1.html

“The amount of thorium it would take to power my whole life is the size of a marble that would fit in my hand,” Sorensen said. “The amount of coal that would power my life would bury my yard to 30 or 40 feet.”

The scientists who designed the first molten salt reactors at Oak Ridge were so far ahead of their time, Sorensen said, that “It’s like a little moment of the 21st century was plucked out and plunked into the ’50s.”

So why aren’t there thorium reactors all over the country?

Several nuclear scientists said the nation was simply too wedded to uranium when the Department of Energy cut funding to the Oak Ridge reactor research.

“It was demonstrated in a couple of test reactors here that it works and it works well,” said Dan Ingersoll, senior program manager for nuclear technology programs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Uhh.. Dual-use??? This is not true… Uranium has continued to be used because the business model of the nuclear industry depends on expensive solid uranium fuel assemblies. There’s also sizable profits in building expensive legacy Light Water Reactors.

The future lies in liquid flouride thorium reactors or perhaps some form of integrated fast reactor like the Traveling Wave Reactor that Bill Gates is funding. Thorium is attractive because it’s much more abundant than uranium. The seed charges of U-233 that are required for LFTR’s can be made from legacy reactor waste.

Oh and China appears to be determined to develop LFTR’s on their own. This should be a “sputnik moment” for the West.

“Japan is a prime example of everything’s that’s wrong with this system. There are approximately 100 million people situated on that small Island chain living a highly materialistic lifestyle of consumerism”

Way late to respond but just wanted to deliver a virtual broken nose to this dumb cunt.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439×648351