It seems that electric powered vehicles are finally taking off, and sales are ready to take off. The new edition of the IEA’s annual Global Electric Vehicle Outlook shows that more than 10 million electric cars were sold worldwide in 2022 and that sales are expected to grow by another 35% this year to reach 14 million. This explosive growth means electric cars’ share of the overall car market has risen from around 4% in 2020 to 14% in 2022 and is set to increase further to 18% this year, based on the latest IEA projections.
If CO2 is the great driver of environmental destruction, never mind that the increased CO2 is feeding 2 billion more people than before thanks to the greening effect of increased CO2, then we should work at warp speed to develop the additional electricity needs that will arise with all electric vehicles coming to market needing to be recharged.
It makes no sense to build more coal and gas fired electric plants, replacing one CO2 generator with another, the best wind power sites are already taken, waste, geothermal and solar power is still a pipe dream, (see the orange sliver in the chart below), so what to do?
Conventional nuclear power is limited and requires a very long and extensive approval process, partly due to the not in my backyard regulation attitude. We are already the world’s largest importer of Uranium, and the world’s supply is to a large extent controlled by non allies. .
How do you eliminate all Coal and natural gas electric plants? Look at the U.S usage: (Last year 2016)
We can see that renewable energy will not suffice. The only real answer is to expand nuclear electricity, but we are already the world’s biggest importer of Uranium. (The Uranium One deal, when we sold 20% of our Uranium mining rights to Russia did not help, but we were in trouble even before ). No, the only real answer is to rapidly develop molten salt Thorium nuclear electricity production. They do not require water for cooling, so they can be placed anywhere where additional capacity is needed, eliminating some of the need for rapid expansion of the electric grid.
The stockpiles from light water reactor keep growing. The temporary storages are all full and spent nuclear fuel is still coming in with no good place to put it. This is an estimate of future stockpiles:
MTHM: Metric Tons Heavy Metals TRU: TRansUranium metals, a large amount of witch is Plutonium 239
The dry storage is usually very neat and catalogued. After all Plutonium 239 is what you make atomic bombs from, so proliferation security is of utmost importance.
TRU can be reprocessed in a molten salt generator and generate far more energy than was obtained the first time around in the LWR
LFTR is a type of Molten Salt Reactor with equipment to convert plentiful thorium into uranium (U233) to use as fuel. It can also use plutonium from LWR (Light Water Reactor) waste. LFTR is not very efficient at using depleted uranium (need a Fast-Spectrum reactor to fission U-238 effectively; in a thermal-spectrum reactor like LFTR or LWR, would convert some U-238 to plutonium which is fissile). The best solution is a two-fuel molten salt reactor
Because a LFTR fissions 99%+ of the fuel (whether thorium, or plutonium from nuclear waste), it consumes all the uranium and transuraniums leaving little long-term radioactive waste. 83% of the waste products are safely stabilized within 10 years. The remaining 17% need to be stored less than 350 years to become completely benign.
The fuel source would be Trans-Uraniums, mostly Plutonium 239 and some Uranium 233. The blanket would contain Thorium, which when converted to Protactinium would be extracted out and in 28 days half of it would be converted to Uranium 233. The temperature in the fissile core will be around 650C and in the blanker somewhat less, its only purpose is to produce U 233 to be used in other nuclear plants.
“LFTR technology can then be used to reprocess and consume the remaining fissile material in spent nuclear fuel stockpiles around the world and to extract and resell many of the other valuable fission byproducts that are currently deemed hazardous waste in their current spent fuel rod form. The U.S. nuclear industry has already allocated $25 billion for storage or reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and the world currently has over 340,000 tons of spent LWR fuel with enough usable fissile material to start one 100 MWe LFTR per day for 93 years. (A 100 MW LFTR requires 100 kg of fissile material (U-233, U-235, or Pu-239) to start the chain reaction). LFTR can also be used to consume existing U-233 stockpiles at ORNL ($500 million allocated for stockpile destruction) and plutonium from weapons stockpiles.”
FS-MSRs essentially avoid the entire fuel qualification issue in that they are tolerant of any fissile material composition, with their inherent strong negative thermal reactivity feedback providing the control necessary to accommodate a shifting fuel feed stream. Fast Spectrum Molten Salt Reactor Options,
Some of the pictures are from a slide presentation given by David Archibald in Melbourne Feb 5 2011. He posted it “for the benefit of all” which I have interpreted as waving the copyright of the pictures
Produces electrical energy at about 5 cents per kWh.
The United States sources of Electricity generation is one third from Natural Gas, one third from Coal and one third from non fossil fuel sources.
The cost to produce electricity with Thorium nuclear power should be about 40% less than Advanced Nuclear and about 30 % less than from Coal (with scrubbers) Solar generation is about 4 times more expensive (without subsidies) in the North-east, where people live. New Mexico, Arizona and California are suitable for cheap Solar power, but they lack Hydropower storage. Wind power is cheaper when the wind blows, but base generation capacity has to be there even when the wind doesn’t blow, so the only gain from wind power is to lessen the mining or extraction of carbon. In addition, wind power kills birds, the free yearly quota of allowable Bald Eagle kills was upped from 1200 to 4200 during the Obama administration. (https://lenbilen.com/2019/04/12/what-is-more-precious-babies-eagles-or-fighting-climate-change/). Golden Eagles and a few other rare birds has a quarter of a million dollar fine associated with their kills. If wind power is increased without finding a solution to the bird kills, whole species may go extinct. Solar power is, and will be used in special applications such as on roofs for backup and peak power assist. Today’s solar panels are easily destroyed by a single hailstorm. Hydroelectric power is for all practical purpose maxed out, so nearly all future increase must come from Coal, Natural Gas, Petroleum or Nuclear. The world experience on installing wind and solar energy is that it is expensive. See fig:
The residential cost of electricity increases as the proportion of total electricity demand is supplied by wind and solar. Part of the cost is in power distribution. Molten Salt Thorium Nuclear Generators is the way to go. It doesn’t depend on sun, wind and water to produce electricity where the need is.
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 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.
United States used to be the leader in Thorium usage. What happened?
The 40 MWe Peach Bottom HTR in the USA was a demonstration Thorium-fueled reactor that ran from 1967-74. and produced a total of 33 billion kWh.
The 330 MWe Fort St Vrain HTR in Colorado, USA, ran from 1976-89. Almost 25 tons of Thorium was used in fuel for the reactor.
A unique Thorium-fueled light water breeder reactor operated from 1977 to 1982 at Shippingport in the USA– it used uranium-233 and had a power output of 60 MWe.
However, after 10 years passed and billions invested, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission abandoned Thorium research, with uranium-fueled nuclear power becoming the standard. In the 1980s, commercial Thorium ventures failed, such as the Indian Point Unit 1 water reactor near New York City, because of the vast financial costs of going it alone in a hostile regulatory environment, and fuel and equipment failures. By the 1990s, the US nuclear power industry had abandoned Thorium, partly because Thorium’s breeding ratio was thought insufficient to produce enough fuel for commercial industrialization.
After the Three Mile Island accident, Middletown, PA in 1979 there was a 30 plus year hiatus in building another nuclear plant, and Thorium was not on any politicians list of areas in which to invest scarce research funds.
Some research and development was still conducted, but it was more concentrated in protecting the U.S. leading position in monitoring and controlling existing nuclear technology. As a contrast even the Netherlands is developing a molten salt Thorium reactor.
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.
China is having a massive Thorium program. The People’s Republic of China has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology. The thorium MSR efforts aims not only to develop the technology but to secure intellectual property rights to its implementation. This may be one of the reasons that the Chinese have not joined the international Gen-IV effort for MSR development, since part of that involves technology exchange. Neither the US nor Russia have joined the MSR Gen-IV effort either. China is currently the largest emitter of CO2 and air pollutants by far, and according to the Paris accord was allowed to emit six times as much pollutants as the U.S. by 2030, being a “developing nation”. Their air quality is already among the worst in the world so something had to be done if they were to achieve world dominance by 2025 and total rule by 2030. Only Thorium can solve the pollution problem and provide the clean energy needed for the future. Regular Uranium Nuclear reactors require large amounts of water and Molten Salt Thorium reactors require little water to operate.
Geneva, Switzerland, 21 August 2018 – As the world struggles with a record-breaking heatwave, China correctly places its trust in the fuel Thorium and the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR) as the backbone of its nation’s plan to become a clean and cheap energy powerhouse. The question is if China will manage to build a homegrown mega export industry, or will others have capacity and will to catch up?
For China, clean energy development and implementation is a test for the state’s ability. Therefore, China is developing the capability to use the “forgotten fuel” thorium, which could begin a new era of nuclear power. The first energy system they are building is a solid fuel molten salt reactor that achieves high temperatures to maximize efficiency of combined heat and power generation applications. However, to fully realize thorium’s energy potential and in this way solve an important mission for China – the security of fuel supply – requires also the thorium itself to be fluid. This is optimized in the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR). The TMSR takes safety to an entirely new level and can be made cheap and small since it operates at atmospheric pressure, one of its many advantages. Thanks to its flexible cooling options it can basically be used anywhere, be it a desert, a town or at sea. In China this is of special interest inland, where freshwater is scarce in large areas, providing a unique way to secure energy independence.
“Everyone in the field is extremely impressed with how China saw the potential, grabbed the opportunity and is now running faster than everyone else developing this futuristic energy source China and the entire world is in a great need of.” – Andreas Norlin, Thorium Energy World
China is not telling all they are doing on Nuclear Energy, but this news item is true:
The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) – part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) – has been given approval by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment to commission an experimental thorium-powered molten-salt reactor, construction of which started in Wuwei city, Gansu province, in September 2018.
A cutaway of the TMSR-LF1 reactor (Image: SINAP)
In January 2011, CAS launched a CNY3 billion (USD444 million) R&D programme on liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs), 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. This is also known as the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (FHR). The TMSR Centre at SINAP at Jiading, Shanghai, is responsible.
Construction of the 2 MWt TMSR-LF1 reactor began in September 2018 and was reportedly completed in August 2021. The prototype was scheduled to be completed in 2024, but work was accelerated.
“According to the relevant provisions of the Nuclear Safety Law of the People’s Republic of China and the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on the Safety Supervision and Administration of Civilian Nuclear Facilities, our bureau has conducted a technical review of the application documents you submitted, and believes that your 2 MWt liquid fuel thorium-based molten salt experimental reactor commissioning plan (Version V1.3) is acceptable and is hereby approved,” the Ministry of Ecology and Environment told SINAP on 2 August.
It added: “During the commissioning process of your 2 MWt liquid fuel thorium-based molten salt experimental reactor, you should strictly implement this plan to ensure the effectiveness of the implementation of the plan and ensure the safety and quality of debugging. If any major abnormality occurs during the commissioning process, it should be reported to our bureau and the Northwest Nuclear and Radiation Safety Supervision Station in time.”
The TMSR-LF1 will use fuel enriched to under 20% U-235, have a thorium inventory of about 50 kg and conversion ratio of about 0.1. A fertile blanket of lithium-beryllium fluoride (FLiBe) with 99.95% Li-7 will be used, and fuel as UF4.
The project is expected to start on a batch basis with some online refueling and removal of gaseous fission products, but discharging all fuel salt after 5-8 years for reprocessing and separation of fission products and minor actinides for storage. It will proceed to a continuous process of recycling salt, uranium and thorium, with online separation of fission products and minor actinides. The reactor will work up from about 20% thorium fission to about 80%.
If the TMSR-LF1 proves successful, China plans to build a reactor with a capacity of 373 MWt by 2030.
As this type of reactor does not require water for cooling, it will be able to operate in desert regions. The Chinese government has plans to build more across the sparsely populated deserts and plains of western China, complementing wind and solar plants and reducing China’s reliance on coal-fired power stations. The reactor may also be built outside China in Belt and Road Initiative nations.
The liquid fuel design is descended from the 1960s Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA. (Researched and written by World Nuclear News)
Yes, it is true. Their design was given to them free, and now PRC is developing the future energy source including claiming intellectual property rights from a source abandoned in 1969 by U.S.A. because of political infighting, not for economical or national security reasons.
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Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 
