Guest post by Alice K. Goldberg, M.A. Energy and Environmental Policy −
There are three main categories of energy that we can choose from as we move into the future: fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear power. We already know why fossil fuels are not the optimal source of power—climate change and ocean acidification are the results. No matter what we do, developing nations will use the cheapest available energy source for rapid development, and right now, in most of the world, that source is coal. People need access to energy to lift them out of poverty, but renewables are far too expensive for developing countries to use as an alternate to coal and natural gas.
Have we exhausted all of our options? How about we talk just for a minute about nuclear power, even though we’ve already had this conversation before and know that nuclear is a bad idea. Now, what are your most understandable and common objections to nuclear power?
- I’m afraid that it is going to blow up near me, causing irreparable damage to the environment and myself.
- Nuclear waste storage lasts thousands of years, and there is no way to guarantee that it will be safe for that long.
- Nuclear warheads and so-called “dirty-bombs” are made using the byproducts of nuclear power plants.
Now, what if I were to tell you that there is a next generation type of nuclear power plant that can relieve all of those concerns, plus add tons of other benefits that the old nuclear facilities don’t bring to the table? Yeah, I’d raise my eyebrows, too, if I hadn’t already heard of energy from thorium.
In our old nuclear reactors, we use URANIUM and PLUTONIUM in solid cores, which require water to cool those cores. Since water boils very easily at 100° C, the cooling system needs to be kept at a very high pressure. If the pressure cannot be maintained, the water vaporizes. At that point, unless the the system is cooled, the core melts and can release dangerous levels of radiation if not contained properly.[i] THORIUM however, can be mixed into a molten salt, a liquid, which can act as the core in this type of reactor − a molten salt reactor (MSR) − and there are a lot of benefits to this model.
There are dozens of scientific articles that you can look into to get specifics about how MSRs work, but they’re all really dry and technical (no offense, engineers!). This article gives you the basics about how it works and the benefits. The big takeaway is that MSRs alleviate all three of environmentalists’ deepest fears about nuclear power:
- MSR core reactions are easy to stop because they don’t take place in a high-pressure environment, so you don’t need back up power for the water pumps like Fukushima. There are also safety systems that require no external power. In some designs, the liquid core will be immediately flushed to a holding tank.
- The byproducts of the fuel cycle decay much faster than your average waste, meaning most of it only needs to be stored for 10 years, and the rest needs to be stored for a lot less time than waste from current power plants. Thorium MSRs are not alone in the ability to have this low level of waste − many different kinds of reactors can recycle most waste products to lower the overall amount of pure waste product.
- When handled properly, the waste products are safe, but trying to turn that waste into nuclear warheads or dirty-bombs is not safe or economically feasible. This alleviates some fear of nuclear proliferation.
Any good skeptic would now ask, “Well if thorium is so great, why haven’t we been using it all along?” That is a very good question, with a rather repugnant answer.
During the Cold War, the U.S. and other governments wanted to produce weapons with the byproducts of nuclear power, and since thorium reactors are a less attractive option than other nuclear plants, they were abandoned. Thorium would have beaten out uranium and plutonium cores for energy production efficiency by a long shot, except that the waste was and remains more difficult to turn into weapons than byproducts of LWRs.[ii]
But conventional nuclear plants take years to erect and have extremely high investment costs. There is no way that thorium could beat out out coal for the lowest cost, right? Well, the great news is that thorium power has excellent potential to actually cost less than coal.
MSRs can be built much smaller than conventional nuclear (and coal) power plants. They can be manufactured in full on an assembly line, a lot like an airplane, bringing down the cost of creating the plants and making many of them readily available on a large scale. The centralization of manufacturing makes regulating the process of production much simpler, as well.
Thorium is a readily available fuel source all over the world, three times more common than uranium. Thorium itself is not a fissile material, so the reaction will need to be initiated with uranium, but once started, the reaction will use thorium as its main source of energy. Plus, these reactors can actually recycle the waste materials from older nuclear reactors; the waste already in existence in the United States could power our country for hundreds of years without any need to mine more material.
At the Thorium Energy Alliance’s 7th Annual Conference in June 2015, a group from the Calvin College Engineering Department from Michigan gave a presentation of their project that commercialized an old demonstration project thorium reactor. They estimated that they could produce power for $0.087/kWh.[iii] That undercuts a lot of coal plants in the states right now, and that calculation was based on an old reactor model that would not be mass-produced. Until we have some live demonstrations of mass-produced plants, we won’t know exactly how much it will cost to produce power − but my money is on it being less expensive than even dirty coal plants in the developing world.
Currently, there are almost fifty projects working on new nuclear technology in the United States, seven of which are molten salt reactors.[iv] These companies are working to commercialize nuclear technology in the near future. Permitting to build these plants is still a barrier in the U.S.A. however, so there will either need to be a major overhaul of our current policies or these plants will be built overseas.
MSRs using thorium need to become a viable substitute for coal power so that developing countries can have their industrial booms without continuing to increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. This viability will only be proven if we invest in thorium plant demonstrations and accelerate the development process as much as possible, as soon as possible.
[i] Brain, Marshall. “How Japan’s Nuclear Crisis Works.” How Stuff Works. http://science.howstuffworks.com/japan-nuclear-crisis2.htm
[ii] Katusa, Marin. “The Thing about Thorium: Why The Better Nuclear Fuel May Not Get A Chance.” Forbes. February 15, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/
[iii] Brichford, Meredy et. al. “Project Proposal and Feasibility Study.” Calvin College Engineering Department. December 8, 2014.
[iv] Brinton, Samuel. “The Advanced Nuclear Industry.” Third Way. June 15, 2015. http://www.thirdway.org/report/the-advanced-nuclear-industry
Other Suggested Readings and Videos
Asafu-Adjaye, John et. al. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” The Breakthrough Institute. 2015.
http://www.ecomodernism.org/
Green, Hank. “Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR): Energy for the Future?” SciShow. YouTube. June 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYxlpeJEKmw
Sorensen, Kirk. “Thorium, an alternative nuclear fuel.” TEDxYYC. April 2011. https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel
Stone, Robert. Dir. “Pandora’s Promise.” Vulcan Productions. 2013, film.
“Thorium.” World Nuclear Association. April 2015. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Thorium
