Why not THORIUM ? one ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 3,500,000 tons of coal.

originally posted by: nOraKat
a reply to: symptomoftheuniverse

Another promising source of energy is off-shore wind.

energy.gov...

At least we seem to be looking into that one ..

"The U.S. Department of Energy's Wind Program funds research nationwide to develop and deploy offshore wind technologies that can capture wind resources off the coasts of the United States and convert that wind into electricity.

... Data on the technical resource potential suggest more than 4,000,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity could be accessed in state and federal waters along the coasts of the United States and the Great Lakes. While not all of this resource potential will realistically be developed, the magnitude (approximately four times the combined generating capacity of all U.S. electric power plants) represents a substantial opportunity to generate electricity near coastal populations."

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From BBC Thorium article:

"Questions are being raised, though, about the advisability of pinning the world’s energy ambitions on another nuclear dream. Environmentalists often allege that if renewable power had commanded a fraction as much research funding as nuclear, it would already be much cheaper and more common.

Dr Nils Bohmer, a nuclear physicist working for a Norwegian environmental NGO, Bellona, said developing thorium was a costly distraction from the need to cut emissions immediately to stave off the prospect of dangerous climate change.

"The advantages of thorium are purely theoretical," he told BBC News.

"The technology development is decades in the future. Instead I think we should focus on developing renewable technology - for example offshore wind technology - which I think has a huge potential to develop.”

www.bbc.com...

A number of people, Governments and Companies have deeply vested interests in the status quo is the reply to that

originally posted by: theantediluvian
a reply to: nOraKat

It seems like there is a deliberate effort to keep the world using fossil fuels, with the development of new energy technologies moving at a snails pace.

Yea I'd say so. I think you've answered your own question.

That said, there are projects and according to wikipedia, India expects to have a thorium fast breeder reactor online by 2016 that uses plutonium to generate neutrons.

Thorium is only capable of use as a thermal breeder reactor.

You can't breed Plutonium from a Thorium reactor and the uranium bred from a Thorium reactor is so badly contaminated by dangerous Uranium 232 that you cannot use the Uranium waste for nuclear weapons either.

One has to bombard Thorium with Protons to obtain a nuclear reaction and because of this to stop the reaction one merely stops the Proton beam. If you cool it with molten lead then as soon as the proton beam is cut, the lead cools and solidifies around it producing an instant safe radiation shield.

a reply to: Oannes

"Why not Zero-point energy?"

As someone else already mentioned "They" want us to use up all our other fossil fuels before "They" move us along to Thorium reactors. Same with utilising Zero point energy fields i imagine. Then there is the simple fact that as far as i know there is no way to tap the zero point field yet in any meaningful manner.

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: Oannes

"Why not Zero-point energy?"

As someone else already mentioned "They" want us to use up all our other fossil fuels before "They" move us along to Thorium reactors.

No, there's no "They" other than the dollar/euro/greed/money conspiracy. Gas and coal is a much better inve$tment.

There's no large-scale engineering practice with thorium reactors. Since nobody other than dictatorships can even get safe, modern, 4th generation conventional PWR's built, who the heck will spend enormous money to build something expensive which has so far unforseen construction and failure modes. Even modern, responsible, sober and rational Germany is going backwards to the 19th century and shutting off their nukes and building coal (!!!!), with a bit of feel good greenwashing with a solar & wind program.

Environmentalists often allege that if renewable power had commanded a fraction as much research funding as nuclear, it would already be much cheaper and more common.

This is a nice, commonly held, and reassuring sentiment, but it is unfortunately not true. There's enough research on the basic physics to know what the energy density of the source is, and it is unfortunately much too low to be cheap.

No amount of research is going to change the extractable energy density of sunlight.

a reply to: mbkennel

"No, there's no "They" other than the dollar/euro/greed/money conspiracy."

Buddy add all of the above together and that's your "They" right there!

originally posted by: nOraKat
Now - year 2014, still, monster diesel trucks roaring past me on the highways, people driving monster-sized pickup trucks and SUV's for no apparent reason. I guess they think they're cool ... like rebels.

You wouldn't happen to drive a Prius would you? You know, one of those electric cars with 500 pounds of lithium that was strip mined from mountains in China then trucked via diesel trucks to a refining plant, then trucked via diesel trucks to a battery manufacturing plant, then trucked via a diesel truck to a Toyota assembly plant, then shipped across the Pacific on a barge that burns diesel, only to be shipped to your local dealership by a diesel truck.

Just you you can smugly prattle about people that drive diesel trucks

Yea, you're really environmentally friendly



Or be like me and drive one of the greenest vehicles on Earth, an old Jeep

Jeeps are Green

...every time you buy a car new car you’re basically buying a million different parts from a million different places around the planet. Scale that up on the order of tens of millions of automobiles, and maybe you see what I’m saying, and I haven’t even touched the actual manufacturing processes, which have been cleaned up quite a bit.

(Sure it's an opinion piece, but the authors argument makes vastly more sense than yours)

originally posted by: nOraKat

hmm i've been reading up on thorium and it might not seem to be all that it is promised to be:
www.beyondnuclear.org...
www.nuclearpledge.com...
www.popularmechanics.com...

a reply to: MeteoraXV

The Beyond Nuclear article was rather poorly thought out. I googled responses to the 2nd one, I don't know how valid they are.
pche-sts.blogspot.com.au...

lftrsuk.blogspot.com.au...

If you search you might be able to find more discussion about 3rd article.

originally posted by: MeteoraXV

originally posted by: nOraKat

hmm i've been reading up on thorium and it might not seem to be all that it is promised to be:
www.beyondnuclear.org...
www.nuclearpledge.com...
www.popularmechanics.com...

Pfft Typical hippy bull crap.

Sorry but there is no "perfect" energy sources.

Wind/solar dont give as the energy needed.
Uranium is to usnatble
Fossil fuels are dirty and running out.

Thorium to me still seems the best of a bad lot. In fact way better still than the others. At least until fusion is cracked.

I seriously doubt if anybody is in the energy generation industry to create more material for atomic bombs. I'm sure they have plenty of that material by now, and have also probably heard that all-out nuclear war is generally pretty bad for business as it tends to reduce your consumer base to approximately zero.

Me, I'm a fan of isotopic Nickel-3. Small scale and decentralization is the way to go.

originally posted by: crazyewok
Wind/solar dont give as the energy needed.
Uranium is to usnatble
Fossil fuels are dirty and running out.

Population reduction is the best solution for our long-term energy needs.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Great Idea hope you will do the honours of going first?

Only fair the ones who support it are the first to die. Lead by example.

originally posted by: crazyewok
Great Idea hope you will do the honours of going first?
Only fair the ones who support it are the first to die. Lead by example.

Thanks for the encouragement. But I'll be gone soon enough, as will we all. The key is reducing the birth rate, which surprisingly doesn't involve killing anyone, unless you can't tell the difference between potential/imaginary people and real people.

cue the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement...alex jones did a funny interview with the head guy of the movement lol

a reply to: C0bzz
i see thanks

originally posted by: sy.gunson

originally posted by: nOraKat
a reply to: symptomoftheuniverse

Another promising source of energy is off-shore wind.

energy.gov...

At least we seem to be looking into that one ..

"The U.S. Department of Energy's Wind Program funds research nationwide to develop and deploy offshore wind technologies that can capture wind resources off the coasts of the United States and convert that wind into electricity.

... Data on the technical resource potential suggest more than 4,000,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity could be accessed in state and federal waters along the coasts of the United States and the Great Lakes. While not all of this resource potential will realistically be developed, the magnitude (approximately four times the combined generating capacity of all U.S. electric power plants) represents a substantial opportunity to generate electricity near coastal populations."

----

From BBC Thorium article:

"Questions are being raised, though, about the advisability of pinning the world’s energy ambitions on another nuclear dream. Environmentalists often allege that if renewable power had commanded a fraction as much research funding as nuclear, it would already be much cheaper and more common.

Dr Nils Bohmer, a nuclear physicist working for a Norwegian environmental NGO, Bellona, said developing thorium was a costly distraction from the need to cut emissions immediately to stave off the prospect of dangerous climate change.

"The advantages of thorium are purely theoretical," he told BBC News.

"The technology development is decades in the future. Instead I think we should focus on developing renewable technology - for example offshore wind technology - which I think has a huge potential to develop.”

www.bbc.com...

A number of people, Governments and Companies have deeply vested interests in the status quo is the reply to that

????

????

With the technology and knowledge we have now, I'm still baffled why there's no aggressive movement in developing this technology.


????

a reply to: nOraKat

OP, I think ATS should be the champion for this emerging technology of the future. As I continue to research this, I'm convinced like many others, THIS IS the answer to the Energy Consumption problems of the world!

Latest report shows good progress has been made and is moving forward:

Thorium Power Is the Safer Future of Nuclear Energy

Future Fuel

China has announced that its researchers will produce a fully functional thorium reactor within the next 10 years. India, with one of the largest thorium reserves on the planet but not much uranium, is also charging ahead. Indian researchers are planning to have a prototype thorium reactor operational early next year, though the reactor’s output will be only about a quarter of the output of a typical new nuclear plant in the west. Norway is currently in the midst of a four-year test of using thorium fuel rods in existing nuclear reactors.

Other nations with active thorium research programs include the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan, and Israel.

There are some drawbacks to thorium fuel cycles, but they are highly technical. For instance, thorium reactors have been criticized as potentially having more neutron leak compared with conventional reactors. More neutron leak means more shielding and other protection is needed for workers at the power plant. And as in most types of alternative energy, thorium power faces a lack of funding for research and of financial incentives for power companies to switch over.

In recent decades, stories about safe, green nuclear power in popular media have tended to focus on the quest for nuclear fusion. Certainly, we can expect, and should hope, for continued progress toward that type of power. But while that happens, the investments by China, India, and other countries suggest that thorium is en route to contribute to the grid in the near term – and to dramatically improve the world’s energy sustainability in the process.

blogs.discovermagazine.com...

Announcing the Thorium Energy Conference 2015 - ThEC15 in Mumbai, India

The international Thorium Energy Conference - ThEC15 - will be held in Mumbai, India during October 19-22, 2015. Mumbai, the financial center of India with more than 20 million people, is also the country’s atomic energy hub. Anushakti Nagar, a part of Mumbai called the “Atomic Power City”, is home to the event and its hosts:

BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) - leader of the Indian Thorium Energy Program
NPCIL (Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited) – constructor of the resulting reactors

ThEC15 will be the largest conference to date, with even more participants and speakers expected to contribute to the event. There will be a reception, a conference banquette, a visit to BARC facilities at Trombay and the Power Reactor at Tarapur and much more.

www.itheo.org...


Particularly this type of reactor:

Molten Salt Reactors: In the 1960s the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) designed and built a demonstration MSR using U-233 as the main fissile driver in its second campaign. The reactor ran over 1965-69 at powers up to 7.4 MWt. The lithium-beryllium salt worked at 600-700ºC and ambient pressure. The R&D program demonstrated the feasibility of this system and highlighted some unique corrosion and safety issues that would need to be addressed if constructing a larger pilot MSR.
There is significant renewed interest in developing thorium-fuelled MSRs. Projects are (or have recently been) underway in China, Japan, Russia, France and the USA. It is notable that the MSR is one of the six ‘Generation IV’ reactor designs selected as worthy of further development (see information page on Generation IV Nuclear Reactors).
The thorium-fuelled MSR variant is sometimes referred to as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), utilizing U-233 which has been bred in a liquid thorium salt blanket.g
Safety is achieved with a freeze plug which if power is cut allows the fuel to drain into subcritical geometry in a catch basin. There is also a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity due to expansion of the fuel.
The China Academy of Sciences in January 2011 launched an R&D program on LFTR, known there as the thorium-breeding molten-salt reactor (Th-MSR or TMSR), and claimed to have the world's largest national effort on it, hoping to obtain full intellectual property rights on the technology. The TMSR Research Centre has a 5 MWe MSR prototype under construction at Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP, under the Academy) with 2015 target for operation.
SINAP has two streams of MSR development – solid fuel (TRISO in pebbles or prisms/ blocks) with once-through fuel cycle, and liquid fuel (dissolved in FLiBe coolant) with reprocessing and recycle.
The TMSR-SF stream has only partial utilization of thorium, relying on some breeding as with U-238, and needing fissile uranium input as well. SINAP aims at a 2 MW pilot plant by about 2015, and a 100 MWt demonstration pebble bed plant with open fuel cycle by about 2025. TRISO particles will be with both low-enriched uranium and thorium, separately.
The TMSR-LF stream claims full closed Th-U fuel cycle with breeding of U-233 and much better sustainability but greater technical difficulty. SINAP aims for a 10 MWt pilot plant by 2025 and a 100 MWt demonstration plant by 2035.
A TMSFR-LF fast reactor optimized for burning minor actinides is to follow.
SINAP sees molten salt fuel being superior to the TRISO fuel in effectively unlimited burn-up, less waste, and lower fabricating cost, but achieving lower temperatures (600°C+) than the TRISO fuel reactors (1200°C+). Near-term goals include preparing nuclear-grade ThF4 and ThO2 and testing them in a MSR. The US Department of Energy (especially Oak Ridge NL) is collaborating with the Academy on the program, which had a start-up budget of $350 million.
However, the primary reason that American researchers and the China Academy of Sciences/ SINAP are working on solid fuel, salt-cooled reactor technology is that it is a realistic first step. The technical difficulty of using molten salts is significantly lower when they do not have the very high activity levels associated with them bearing the dissolved fuels and wastes. The experience gained with component design, operation, and maintenance with clean salts makes it much easier then to move on and consider the use of liquid fuels, while gaining several key advantages from the ability to operate reactors at low pressure and deliver higher temperatures.

www.world-nuclear.org...

originally posted by: charlyv
Another problem with thorium, are the by-products. They are not trivial by any means.

Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – 'so these are really U-233 reactors,' says Karamoskos.

This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste.

Source: The Guardian

The article's rebuttal by thorium advocates is here:
energyfromthorium.com...

originally posted by: Maslo

originally posted by: charlyv
Another problem with thorium, are the by-products. They are not trivial by any means.

Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – 'so these are really U-233 reactors,' says Karamoskos.

This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste.

Source: The Guardian

The article's rebuttal by thorium advocates is here:
energyfromthorium.com...

Thanks for the info. I've been looking for any valid reason or reasons why not Thorium. And the counter-argument against it are somewhat unclear and with no solid basis.

For example, Dr. Karamoskos argument:

One has to wonder why does not think the thorium-based LFTR will be viable. Perhaps he thinks it will have to operate at higher pressures than existing reactors–but it won’t, it will operate at lower pressures. Perhaps he thinks that it will operate at a lower temperature and achieve lower thermodynamic efficiency–but it won’t, it will operate at higher temperatures and achieve higher efficiency. Perhaps he thinks that the thorium fuel will be more difficult to find and more expensive than uranium fuel–but it won’t, it is more common than uranium and will be mined as we search for rare-earth materials for our wind turbines.

Dr. Karamoskos does seem anxious to promote “guilt by association”, however, by lumping any thorium-based reactor in with uranium-based reactor technologies, which he then goes on to paint as dependent on “extensive taxpayer subsidies.” This is certainly not the case in the United States and I suspect is not the case in the UK as well. He also decides, apparently out of thin air, that thorium is going to cost an “order-of-magnitude” more than uranium-based reactors, without any supporting evidence.

Anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Rowberry also creates a false collusion when he asserts that the effort to develop thorium-based reactors is simply a smokescreen for continued use of uranium-based pressurized-water reactors (PWR).

“This could be seen to excuse the continued use of PWRs until thorium is [widely] available.”

Interesting theory, Mr. Rowberry, but it doesn’t support the author’s thesis that thorium reactors are a bad idea because we haven’t done them before. It simply suggests that uranium-based reactor providers are looking to transition into thorium, another thing that we have seen no evidence whatsoever of taking place.

But in a great irony, Mr. Rees then goes on to call the uranium-based nuclear industry itself to testify against thorium reactors, seeming to contradict the statement of Mr. Rowberry entirely. He points out that there is no interest amongst the existing nuclear reactor vendors for thorium, and references the NNL report to buttress this evidentiary line. Again, one is left to wonder how this supports the overall thesis of “we haven’t done this so we shouldn’t do this.” Rather, it seems to support an alternative viewpoint from Mr. Rowberry, namely that the technological overlap between existing water-cooled, uranium-based reactors and liquid-fluoride thorium reactors is so miniscule that existing players see little reason to try to promote a better technology.

energyfromthorium.com...

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