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An op-ed article in the Telegraph, UK, last year urged President Obama “to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project” and by so doing we could “reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.” The article suggests we invent and commercialize nuclear reactors designed around radioactive decay of thorium.
The article concludes with the assertion that renewables can’t meet our needs. But that’s asserting a belief, not reporting scientifically observable data or a scientifically disprovable hypothesis. And the better question in that regard is not: “Can renewable and sustainable energy meet our needs?”
But: “How can renewable and sustainable energy meet our needs?”
Thorium, like radon, carbon 14, uranium 238, and unlike U 235, and plutonium, is radioactive, but not fissionable. It will emit particles, and heat, so the waste will be a problem, but it can neither be fashioned into a bomb, or, I imagine, melt down fully or partially in the manner of Chernobyl, Fukushima or Three Mile Island. On the other hand, a few observations:
- This was an opinion piece in a UK paper,
- While it references work by a scientist, it is not a scientific paper or an article in the nuclear trade papers,
- There are no “thorium reactors” in operation, and we don’t have the technology to build one,
- If we were to team up with China, it should be in solar power and wind power. They have installed 41.8 gigawatts – enough for about 48 million Americans, and, I imagine, 200 million Chinese.
- We have been working on fission based nuclear power since the 1950’s. While there are 74 reactors in the US, given the subsidies provided by the US taxpayer, one could argue that the technology isn’t really commercially viable, so 3 to 5 years for a new nuclear technology seems optimistic.
- We will stop arguing about “IPCC hockey sticks” when people accept science as a tool to understand natural phenomena and develop policy.
That this article appears in a UK paper urging the U. S. President to take some actions demonstrates our relationship with the U. K., that’s good. However, given that there are no “thorium reactors,” this is probably 15 to 40 years from commercially viable.
The goal of the Manhattan Project was to figure out how to confine a sufficient amount of fissionable material in a small enough volume of space such that a critical mass of fissioning atoms was reached such that an explosion occurred. This was probably easier to do than figure out how to harness sufficient radioactive material to generate sufficient heat to boil water to turn a turbine to generate electricity, and make it the gizmo commercially viable.
Similarly, the goal Kennedy suggested, and we rallied behind, “to land a man on the moon, and bring him home safely, within 10 years,” was qualitatively different than Obama’s State of the Union goal of “80% clean electricity by 2035.” To accomplish the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions we needed to design and build rocket ships that would endeavor to carry crews of three to the moon and back, 13 times. NASA staff probably numbered 100,000 or less. But let’s say 250,000 to include everyone, astronauts, soldiers engineers, draftsmen, janitors, to the sailors who pulled the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo capsules out of the oceans. Our energy infrastructure must serve 307 million all day every day, 365 days per year, 366 on leap years, going forward. NASA’s current $19 Billion budget would build between 9.5 and 6.3 gw of wind, using today’s technology, 3.1 GW of Solar, also using today’s technology, and 3.56 GW of thorium nuclear reactors (if we had the technology). If we need 1 kw per person, about 307 gigawatts, that’s
The article says they need “£2bn to build the first one, and … £100mn for the next test phase.” At an exchange rate of $1.6 USD to £1.0 UK, that’s $5.33 per watt, which is more than the cost of wind power, and slightly less than the cost of solar today, but more than I would expect to pay for solar in 2012.
The article talks about magic bullets. I’m skeptical.
Like fusion – which we are no longer pursuing – reasearch at MIT is being shut down – this may be a good technology in 50 or 80 years. But we can’t deploy it today. So the question is how long before it can be deployed on a commerical scale, and what do we do in the near term?
The other question is what are the costs to the taxpayers of research, regulation, waste management and working out the bugs?
We also have a few systems and logistics issues. According to Oak Ridge Labs, about 300 kids graduate with B. S. degrees in nuclear engineering every year. How many engineers do we need to design and build a whole new energy infrastructure?
Here’s the text of the article:
Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.
Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.
There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.
Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
Thorium burns the plutonium residue left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.
“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.
Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.
After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.
“They were really going after the weapons,” said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. “It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying.” It emits too many high gamma rays.
You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.
Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. “They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology,” he said.
Another decade was lost. It was a sad triumph of vested interests over scientific progress. “We have very little time to waste because the world is running out of fossil fuels. Renewables can’t replace them. Nuclear fusion is not going work for a century, if ever,” he said.
The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr Rubbia’s patent for an accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor, and is working on his design for a thorium version at its UK operation.
Victoria Ashley, the project manager, said it could lead to a network of pint-sized 600MW reactors that are lodged underground, can supply small grids, and do not require a safety citadel. It will take £2bn to build the first one, and Aker needs £100mn for the next test phase.
The UK has shown little appetite for what it regards as a “huge paradigm shift to a new technology”. Too much work and sunk cost has already gone into the next generation of reactors, which have another 60 years of life.
So Aker is looking for tie-ups with countries such as the US, Russia, or China. The Indians have their own projects – none yet built – dating from days when they switched to thorium because their weapons programme prompted a uranium ban.
America should have fewer inhibitions than Europe in creating a leapfrog technology. The US allowed its nuclear industry to stagnate after Three Mile Island in 1979.
Anti-nuclear neorosis is at last ebbing. The White House has approved $8bn in loan guarantees for new reactors, yet America has been strangely passive. Where is the superb confidence that put a man on the moon?
A few US pioneers are exploring a truly radical shift to a liquid fuel based on molten-fluoride salts, an idea once pursued by US physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the 1960s. The original documents were retrieved by Mr Sorensen.
Moving away from solid fuel may overcome some of thorium’s “idiosyncracies”. “You have to use the right machine. You don’t use diesel in a petrol car: you build a diesel engine,” said Mr Sorensen.
Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. “The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor. It’s close-fitting,” he said.
Nuclear power could become routine and unthreatening. But first there is the barrier of establishment prejudice.
When Hungarian scientists led by Leo Szilard tried to alert Washington in late 1939 that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, they were brushed off with disbelief. Albert Einstein interceded through the Belgian queen mother, eventually getting a personal envoy into the Oval Office.
Roosevelt initially fobbed him off. He listened more closely at a second meeting over breakfast the next day, then made up his mind within minutes. “This needs action,” he told his military aide. It was the birth of the Manhattan Project. As a result, the US had an atomic weapon early enough to deter Stalin from going too far in Europe.
The global energy crunch needs equal “action”. If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus.
Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes.