Is THORIUM the Future of Nuclear Power?

[John Clark]

The company "Copenhagen Atomics" has an ambitious long term goal, to build Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors on an assembly line so they can make one a day. This video gives a good outline about how they work. 

Is THORIUM the Future of Nuclear Power?

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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[Alan Grayson]

There are many advantages for use of Thorium as a reactor fuel. Listing them would be desirable. For example, it is plentiful in the environment and doesn't produce waste products which can be used to make nuclear weapons, such a Plutonium. The main problem with its adoption is the huge infrastructure investment already made for mining and processing Uranium. AG

[Brent Meeker]

I've been giving talks promoting thorium molten salt reactors for 15 years.  See attached.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 3:04 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There are many advantages for use of Thorium as a reactor fuel. Listing them would be desirable.

I sent this to the list some years ago.  

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) are what fusion wanted to be but never achieved, despite tens of billions of dollars poured into it. Certainly LFTR's are better than conventional nuclear fission. Consider the advantages:

*Thorium is much more common than Uranium, it's twice as common as Tin and almost as common as lead. And Thorium is easier to extract from its ore than Uranium.

*A Thorium reactor burns up all the Thorium in it, 100%,  so at current usage that element could supply our energy needs for many billions of years; A conventional light water reactor only burns 0.7% of the Uranium in it. We'll run out of Thorium in the Earth's crust about the same time that the sun will run out of Hydrogen.

* To burn the remaining 99.3% of Uranium you'd have to use a exotic fast neutron breeder reactor, Thorium reactors use slow neutrons and so are inherently more stable because you have more time to react if something goes wrong. Also breeders produce massive amounts of Plutonium which is a bad thing if you're worried about people making bombs. Thorium produces an insignificant amount of Plutonium.

* Thorium does produce Uranium 233 and theoretically you could make a bomb out of that, but it would be contaminated with Uranium 232 which is a powerful gamma ray emitter which would make it suicidal to work with unless extraordinary precautions were taken, and even then the unexploded bomb would be so radioactive it would give away its position if you tried to hide it, the gamma rays would also destroy the bomb's electronic firing circuits and degrade its chemical explosives needed for implosion. For these reasons, even after 80 years, no nation has a Uranium 233 bomb in its weapons inventory.

*A Thorium reactor only produces about 1% as much waste as a conventional reactor and the stuff it does make is not as nasty, after about 5 years 87% of it would be safe and the remaining 13% in 300 years; a conventional reactor would take 100,000 years.

*A Thorium reactor has an inherent safety feature, the fuel is in liquid form (Thorium dissolved in un-corrosive molten Fluoride salts) so if for whatever reason things get too hot the liquid expands and so the fuel gets less dense and the reaction slows down.

*There is yet another fail safe device. At the bottom of the reactor is something called a "freeze plug", fans blow on it to freeze it solid, if things get too hot the plug melts and the liquid drains out into a holding tank and the reaction stops; also if all electronic controls die due to a loss of electrical power the fans will stop the plug will melt and the reaction will stop.

*Thorium reactors work at much higher temperatures than conventional reactors so you have far better energy efficiency; in fact they are so hot the waste heat could be used to desalinate sea water or generate hydrogen fuel from water.

* Although the liquid Fluoride salt is very hot it is not under pressure so that makes the plumbing of the thing much easier, and even if you did get a leak it would not be the utter disaster it would be in a conventional reactor; that is also why the very expensive containment building in common light water reactors need to be so much larger than the reactor itself. With Thorium nothing is under pressure and there is no danger of a disastrous phase change so the expensive containment building can be made much more compact.

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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[spudb...@aol.com]

How safe is "it" from an accident, say sodium fire with radiation spread, versus, a "ater" reactor and a core meltdown, versus, a Chernobyl reactor with graphite moderation? 

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 10:37 AM 'spudb...@aol.com' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> How safe is "it" from an accident, say sodium fire with radiation spread, versus, a "ater" reactor and a core meltdown, versus, a Chernobyl reactor with graphite moderation? 

LFTRs don't use sodium or graphite, they use a molten mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2), and it is not flammable and it's not corrosive. The thorium fuel is dissolved in it. If you look at that video you can see it flows like water not like lava.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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[Brent Meeker]

I'd say the reactor itself is quite safe.  Any loss of control would just melt the "freeze plug" and dump the reactor molten salt into an underground chamber where it would cool to a glassy mass that's not water soluble.

The part I'd be more concerned with the external loop that chemically separates the reaction products contaminating the liquid thorium flouride to return the U233.  These are the typically shorter half-life fission nuclei







I don't know enough about the processes needed to remove those waste nuclei.  Sure it's just chemistry; but it's chemistry with radioactive chemicals.  They are of relatively low toxicity, but anything above zero is going to scare the public.

Brent

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Much thanks. For these reasons I now look to helium-4 moderated, and Heat Pipe reactors as being the safest and possibly most affordable.

Take care. 

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Very good and thanks. I think the goal needs to be an accident-free reactor. This has been what has driven up the cost for this engineering. 

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[John Clark]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2025 at 7:11 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd say the reactor itself is quite safe.  Any loss of control would just melt the "freeze plug" and dump the reactor molten salt into an underground chamber where it would cool to a glassy mass that's not water soluble.
The part I'd be more concerned with the external loop that chemically separates the reaction products contaminating the liquid thorium flouride to return the U233.  These are the typically shorter half-life fission nuclei

But none of the plumbing in a  Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is under high pressure like a conventional reactor is, so even if there is a leak it's not a catastrophe. End it produces a lot less nuclear waste. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

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