Thr problem with Thorium is that it is classified as source material the same as Uranium. Natural Uranium is fissile in a heavy water moderated reactor, Thorium is only slightly radioactive, and should be regulated like all other radioactive products, like household smoke detectors and medical isotopes.
Congress should immediately declassify Thorium as a source material. This would again enable U.S. to mine rare earth materials like China and the rest of the world.
The video speaks for itself and is well worth watching. Especially listen at 15:30 min why molten salt reactors were abandoned.
This video catalogs the problems with Thorium, beginning with the regulatory nightmare of seemingly endless regulations that makes no sense from a research perspective, to political bias, and to protect the status quo. It is very informative.
With Molten Salt Reactors, a catastrophe like Fukushima cannot happen. It began with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake not far from the Fukushima 6 Nuclear reactors complex. The impact was a magnitude 6.8 earthquake and the operators immediately scrammed the safety rods to stop all the reactors. This succeeded! The reactors were designed with earthquakes in mind, and they passed the test. The backup power started up successfully so the cooling pumps could operate. There was one major problem though. The earthquake was so bad that the water in the spent fuel holding tanks splashed out and exposed the spent fuel rods to air, releasing enough radioactivity to make entering the buildings impossible.
The water pumps worked for a while, but then came the tsunami. All the reactors were inside a tsunami wall, so far, so good. But the fuel storage tanks for the fuel for the backup power generators were outside the tsunami wall and were washed away. The batteries were only supposed to last until backup power was established, and with complete power loss and water circulation ended the meltdown started. This disaster was even bigger than Chernobyl and contamination is still spreading.
Japan has spent roughly 1 trillion yen ($7.3 billion) annually on the damage caused by the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that occurred 12 years ago, and the final price tag is still uncertain.
In addition, the Japanese government has arranged 13.5 trillion yen to pay for reparations and cleanup efforts, with those outlays covered by Japanese government bonds. The state is extending roughly 10 trillion yen to TEPCO to cover compensation costs.
In a molten salt Thorium reactor, when power is cut off in an emergency, only gravity is needed for a safe shutdown, and gravity hasn’t failed us yet.
With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like Chernobyl are impossible. The Three Mile Island accident was bad. The Chernobyl disaster was ten million times worse. Ah yes, I remember it well.
One morning at work, a fellow co-worker, a Ph.D. Chemist working on an Electron Capture Detector, containing a small amount of Nickel 63, came with a surprising question: You know nuclear science, how come the reactors in Chernobyl don’t have a containment vessel? Well- I answered, it is because they are carbon moderated and their failure mode is that they go prompt critical, and no containment vessel in the world can hold it in, so they skip it. He turned away in disgust. A few weeks later my wife’s father died, and we went to Denmark to attend the funeral. The day of the return back to the U.S. we heard that there had been a nuclear incident in Sweden, too much radiation had caused two nuclear power stations to close down. The Chernobyl disaster had happened 26 April 1986, and this was the first time anyone outside of Chernobyl has heard about it, two days later. This was still the Soviet Union, and nothing ever did go wrong in it worthy of reporting.
(Photo Courtesy of EBRD)
Notice the gaping hole where the reactor was. The adjacent reactor was not shut down immediately, but continued to operate and deliver power for days. During the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the still-very-real health risks inherent to lingering around certain parts of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone just didn’t sink in with Russian soldiers and their commanding officers based in Belarus. Radiation sunk in, though—particularly after Russian troops dug into the zone’s heavily irradiated Red Forest. And today, some soldiers are still falling sick, according to diplomatic sources cited by the UK journal The Independent.
The radiation cloud immediately following the accident continued to spread, and was first noticed in Sweden, and the SLV immediately declared reindeer meat, wild game and inland fish with a 300-bequerel/kilogram (Bq/kg) count or higher to be unsafe for human consumption and therefore unmarketable. 75% of all reindeer meat was deemed unfit for human consumption, and this played havoc with the Sami population.
(But the carbon moderated Uranium reactors are the most efficient in producing Pu-239 the preferred nuclear bomb material.)
As I mentioned before, the failure mode of carbon moderated nuclear power plants is that they can go prompt critical during power downs, so very stringent power down protocols must be followed. There is a loss of power production during the lengthy power down process. Carbon moderated nuclear power plants has a positive temperature coefficient; the warmer it gets the more power it produces, so they must be provided with multiple safety circuits and infallible scram shutdowns. However, power shutdowns are costly, so they try to stretch the shutdown intervals as much as possible. In the case of Chernobyl, the protocols were violated for political reasons, one or more safety circuits were disabled to allow power production for as long as possible and suddenly there was a power surge, the temperature surged and the chain reaction started. The scram rods failed and the rest is history.
This has nothing to do with anything, but Chernobyl means wormwood in Russian. It is mentioned in the Bible, Revelation 8: 10-11 “ And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. ”
Molten Salt Thorium reactors cannot be used to supply Plutonium 239, only Uranium 233, and so far there is no research on how to make bombs from U 233, and they are far safer than even Light water Uranium reactors. Only gravity is needed to shut them down in case of earthquakes, total power failures, EMP pulses and bombs.
With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like the Three Mile Island disaster will not happen. Ah yes, I remember it well, March 28, 1979. We lived in South East Pennsylvania at the time, well outside the evacuation zone, but a fellow engineer at work took off, took vacation and stayed at a hotel in western Virginia over the weekend fearing a nuclear meltdown. He had just seen the movie “The China Syndrome” that had premiered just twelve days earlier.
My wife went to a Christian retreat a few miles outside the evacuation zone, and none of the participants so much as heard of any problem, there never were any mandatory evacuations. However, since the accident prevented the reactor to shut down properly radioactive gasses including radioactive Iodine had to be released. Governor Dick Thornburgh, on the advice of NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie, advised the evacuation “of pregnant women and pre-school age children…within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility”. The evacuation zone was extended to a 20-mile radius on Friday, March 30. Within days, 140,000 people had left the area. More than half of the 663,500 population within the 20-mile radius remained in that area. According to a survey conducted in April 1979, 98% of the evacuees had returned to their homes within three weeks.There was concern though, and a disaster it was indeed with a partial meltdown of the core, rendering the installation a total loss, leaving a big, forever cleanup bill. The cost so far has totaled over 2 billion dollars.
A combination of personnel error, design deficiencies and component failures caused the TMI accident, which permanently changed both the nuclear industry and the NRC. Public fear and distrust increased, NRC’s regulations and oversight became broader and more robust, and management of the plants was scrutinized more carefully. Careful analysis of the accident’s events identified problems and led to permanent and sweeping changes in how NRC regulates its licensees – which, in turn, has reduced the risk to public health and safety.
The side effect of increased regulation is increased cost and delay in construction of new nuclear plants. Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled, and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt. Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled.
Another side effect of the TMI accident is fear of trying a different and safer approaches, since they conflict with existing regulations. The next Nuclear power reactor came online in 2016, but it is the same type of boiling water reactor as before, not a Molten Salt Thorium reactor with its inherent radically increased safety.
The Generation IV International Forum’s current membership consists of:
Argentina*
Japan
Australia
Republic of Korea
Brazil*
Russian Federation
Canada
Republic of South Africa
People’s Republic of China
Switzerland
Euratom
United Kingdom
France
United States
* Non-active member.
The list of possible implementations is long and growing, Here are most of them: Most of them can operate on Uranium or Plutonium or mixed fuel including a fertile blanket of Thorium that converts to U-233 as fissile material. The remaining problem is the clean extraction of fission products and protactinium during full operation. In the mean time they will help generate enough U-233 for clean operation with minimum waste production.
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (GFR)
The GFR system is a high-temperature (850C) helium-cooled fast-spectrum reactor with a closed fuel cycle. It combines the advantages of fast-spectrum systems for long-term sustainability of uranium resources and waste minimization (through fuel multiple reprocessing and fission of long-lived actinides), with those of high-temperature systems (high thermal cycle efficiency and industrial use of the generated heat, for hydrogen production for example).
This system is ideal for co-generation of electricity and hydrogen production.
Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor (LFR)
a
This reactor type would have multiple applications including production of electricity, hydrogen and process heat. System concepts represented in plans of the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) System Research Plan (SRP) are based on Europe’s ELFR lead-cooled system, Russia’s BREST-OD-300 and the SSTAR system concept designed in the US. Numerous additional LFR concepts are also under various stages of development in different countries including China, Russia, the USA, Sweden, Korea and Japan.
Molten Salt Reactor (MSR)
. The onsite fuel reprocessing unit using pyrochemistry allows breeding plutonium or uranium-233 from Thorium.
Compared with solid-fuel reactors, MSFR systems have lower fissile inventories, no radiation damage constraint on attainable fuel burn-up, no requirement to fabricate and handle solid fuel, and a homogeneous isotopic composition of fuel in the reactor. These and other characteristics give MSFRs potentially unique capabilities for actinide burning and extending fuel resources.
MSR developments in Russia on the Molten Salt Actinide Recycler and Transmuter (MOSART) aim to be used as efficient burners of transuranic (TRU) waste from spent UOX and MOX light water reactor (LWR) fuel without any uranium and thorium support and also with it. Other advanced reactor concepts are being studied, which use the liquid salt technology, as a primary coolant for Fluoride salt-cooled High-temperature Reactors (FHRs), and coated particle fuels similar to high temperature gas-cooled reactors.
More generally, there has been a significant renewal of interest in the use of liquid salt as a coolant for nuclear and non-nuclear applications. These salts could facilitate heat transfer for nuclear hydrogen production concepts, concentrated solar electricity generation, oil refineries, and shale oil processing facilities amongst other applications.
Supercritical-Water-Cooled Reactor (SCWR)
SCWRs are high temperature, high-pressure, light-water-cooled reactors that operate above the thermodynamic critical point of water (374°C, 22.1 MPa).
SCWR designs have unique features that offer many advantages compared to state-of the-art water-cooled reactors:
SCWRs offer increases in thermal efficiency relative to current-generation water-cooled reactors. The efficiency of a SCWR can approach 44% or more, compared to 34-36% for current reactors.
Reactor coolant pumps are not required. The only pumps driving the coolant under normal operating conditions are the feed water pumps and the condensate extraction pumps.
The steam generators used in pressurized water reactors and the steam separators and dryers used in boiling water reactors can be omitted since the coolant is superheated in the core.
Containment, designed with pressure suppression pools and with emergency cooling and residual heat removal systems, can be significantly smaller than those of current water-cooled reactors.
The higher steam enthalpy allows to decrease the size of the turbine system and thus to lower the capital costs of the conventional island.
There remains a number of challenges before this approach can be fully implemented, and one limiting factor is composite materials that can withstand high pressure, high temperature and high radiation at the same time.
Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR)
The SFR uses liquid sodium as the reactor coolant, allowing high power density with low coolant volume fraction and operation at low pressure. While the oxygen-free environment prevents corrosion, sodium reacts chemically with air and water and requires a sealed coolant system.
Plant size options under consideration range from small, 50 to 300 MWe, modular reactors to larger plants up to 1 500 MWe. The outlet temperature is 500-550°C for the options, which allows the use of the materials developed and proven in prior fast reactor programs.
Very-High-Temperature Reactor (VHTR)
The VHTR is a next step in the evolutionary development of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. It is a graphite-moderated, helium-cooled reactor with thermal neutron spectrum. It can supply nuclear heat and electricity over a range of core outlet temperatures between 700 and 950°C, or more than 1 000°C in future. The reactor core type of the VHTR can be a prismatic block core such as the Japanese HTTR, or a pebble-bed core such as the Chinese HTR-10.
The VHTR can support alternative fuel cycles such as U-Pu, Pu, MOX (Mixed Oxide fuel), U-Thorium.
From Denmark comes this interesting sales pitch for a nuclear waste, thorium based nuclear technology. Like most sales pitches it glosses over the remaining problems to implement it, and emphasizes advantages, which are many. Let us take a look at it:
Copenhagen Atomics’ headquarters are co-located with Alfa Laval in Copenhagen.[2]
History
Copenhagen Atomics was founded in 2014 by a group of scientists and engineers meeting at Technical University of Denmark and around the greater Copenhagen area for discussions on thorium and molten salt reactors, who later incorporated in 2015.[3] In 2016, Copenhagen Atomics was part of MIMOSA, a European nuclear molten salt research consortium.[4]
Copenhagen Atomics became the first private company in 2017, to offer a commercial molten salt loop.[5][6]
By the end of 2022, Copenhagen Atomics finished a full-size prototype reactor. The prototype is a full-scale test platform, to test the system in its entirety, with water as its medium. In 2023 a full-scale prototype molten salt reactor will be built to test the entire system with non-radioactive molten salts.[7]
Copenhagen Atomics is pursuing a hardware-driven iterative component-by-component approach to reactor development, instead of a full design license and approval approach. Copenhagen Atomics is actively developing and testing valves, pumps, heat exchangers, measurement systems, salt chemistry and purification systems, and control systems and software for molten salt applications.[9] The company has also developed the world’s only canned molten salt pump and are developing an active electromagnetic bearing canned molten salt pump.[9]
Copenhagen Atomics offers many of their technologies commercially available to the market. This includes pumped molten salt loops for use in molten salt reactor research, as well as highly purified salts for high temperature concentrated solar power, molten salt energy storage, and molten salt chemistry research.[10]
Environmental Impact
According to the website Thorium Energy World: “The CAWB [ed. Copenhagen Atomics Waste Burner] will use thorium to burn out actinides from spent nuclear fuel in order to convert long-lived radioactive waste into short-lived radioactive waste, while producing large amounts of energy and jobs in present time. End of Wikipedia quote.
The limiting factor in this molten salt reactors buildup is the availability of Uranium 233, the result of neutron bombardment of Thorium resulting in Protactinium, which converts to U-233, the real clean nuclear fuel in 29 days. The breeding gain is only 1.05, so it takes quite some time to build up the capacity. The separation stage is the critical stage, and they will not provide it, but the technology is there, but is not yet ready to be commercialized, and they were silent about who was going to do it. It is, which he also acknowledged, expensive with current methods.
Russia has an active Thorium program.This used to be true, but it was decided that for the Arctisc buildup this barge (below) would be outfitted with regular nuclear power the same type that are in Russia’s nuclear powered ice breakers.
This is a self-contained 7m MW electric or 200 MW heat cogeneration Nuclear Reactor on a barge. Coolant readily available. Hoist it a couple of cables and the town to be serviced will have all the power and heat it needs. This is especially useful in the Arctic. Russia is trying to establish Arctic domination, both commercially and militarily. They have over 30 ice breakers, about half of them nuclear. U.S. has two conventional ice breakers, of which only one is operational.
Now for the good news: Russia is also trying to commercialize hybrid fusion-fission reactors:
Nuclear Engineering International: 29 May 2018
Russia develops a fission-fusion hybrid reactor. A new fission-fusion hybrid reactor will be assembled at Russia’s Kurchatov Institute by the end of 2018, Peter Khvostenko, scientific adviser of the Kurchatov complex on thermonuclear energy and plasma technologies, announced on 14 May. The physical start-up of the facility is scheduled for 2020.The hybrid reactor combines the principles of thermonuclear and nuclear power – essentially a tokamak fusion reactor and a molten salt fission reactor. Neutrons produced in a small tokamak will be captured in a molten salt blanket located around tokamak. The facility will use Thorium as a fuel, which is cheaper and more abundant than uranium. Moreover, unlike a fusion reactor, a hybrid will not require super high temperatures to generate energy.
Thorium has benefits compared with uranium reaction and has been endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
In the reactor, plasma fusion generates neutrons that fuel subsequent fission.
Hybrid reactors reduce the impact of the nuclear fuel cycle on the environment. The concept combines conventional fission processes and fusion reactor principles, comprising a fusion reactor core in combination with a subcritical fission reactor. The results of the fusion reaction, which would normally be absorbed by the cooling system of the reactor, would feed into the fission section, and sustain the fission process. Thorium in a molten salt blanket will enable breeding of uranium-233.
Some of the expected advantages include:
Utilization of actinides and transmutation from long-lived radioactive waste;
An increase in energy recovered from uranium by a large factor;
The inherent safety of the system, which can be shut down rapidly; and
High burnup of fissile materials leaving few by-products.
The hybrid fission-fusion reactor is seen as a near-term commercial application of fusion pending further research on pure fusion power systems.
This is very interesting, and I will follow up when I get more information.
It seems that with the Ukraine war, Russia is preoccupied with other things than to reduce nuclear waste. Ah well.
No need for evacuation zones, can be placed near urban areas. Molten Salt Thorium reactors operate at atmospheric pressure and have a very high negative temperature coefficient, so there is no risk for a boil-over. They are easily made earthquake-safe and no pressure vessel is needed. This will greatly simplify the approval process, no need for elaborate evacuation plans have to be developed. Since the Three Mile Island accident there was a thirty year gap in approvals for new nuclear plants. The “not in my backyard ” mentality reigned supreme, and delay and denial was the rule of the years. But the lawyers still got their share, leading to escalating cost for new nuclear power. In the early days of nuclear power France took the approach of building some of their nuclear plants near the Belgian and German border, so they only had to develop half of an evacuation plan, leaving the other half to their ‘understanding’ neighbors. It also lead to placing the nuclear plants where there was least popular resistance, not where they were needed the most, adding to the strain and efficiency losses on the electric grid. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors have one additional advantage. They do not need access to water, so they can be placed even in desert areas. When a coal fired, or even a natural gas fired plant is decommissioned, it can be replaced in the same place, the electric connections are already there, so there is no need to go through lengthy and costly eminent domain processes ‘to acquire more land, or even expand the electric grid for that location. Thorium power is clean power.
Virtually no spent fuel problem, very little on site storage or transport. I have been following the events at Fukushima Nuclear Power plants disaster with great interest. How ironic that one of the greatest problems was with the spent fuel, not with the inability to shut down the working units. The spent fuel issue is the real Achilles’ heel of the Nuclear Power Industry. The cost of reprocessing and storing spent reactor fuel will burden us for centuries after the reactors themselves have been decommissioned when their useful life is ended. Molten Salt Thorium nuclear power works differently from conventional Uranium fueled Reactors as the fissile fuel gets generated in the breeding process itself and nearly all fuel gets consumed as it is generated. When the process shuts down, that is it. Only the radioactivity that is en route so to say will have to be accounted for, not everything generated thus far in the process. The difference is about ten thousand to one in the size of the problem. It is high time to rebuild and expand our Nuclear power generation by switching to Thorium..
The detractors of Thorium like to point out that the Thorium-U233 process generates some U 232 in the presence of free neutrons. U-232 decays with a 69-year half-life through 1.9-year half-life Th-228 to Tl-208, which emits a 2.6 MeV gamma ray upon decay. Gamma rays are easily shielded by clean water, so transportation and storage is not a problem. Rather than being a problem, this is a great asset. The 232U decay chain is the source of the high energy gamma rays that make 232U the preferred tracer isotope. Uranium-232 has a half-life of 69.8 years, and the decay chain terminates at 208Pb (National Nuclear Data Center).
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 
