Finally, a new look at Thorium
About time... Wired magazine
has a nice writeup on Kirk Sorensen and his push to build reactors that use Thorium rather than Uranium:
Uranium Is So Last Century � Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague�s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book�s title � Fluid Fuel Reactors � jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. �I took it home that night, but I didn�t understand all the nuclear terminology,� Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world�s energy future.
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen�s eye was the description of Weinberg�s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker�s build and a marine�s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry�s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it�s so plentiful in nature, it�s virtually inexhaustible. It�s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the �50s through the early �70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the �60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors � in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.
Today, however, Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he�s not at his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama � or wrapping up the master�s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the University of Tennessee � he runs a popular blog called Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the site�s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.
And the online upstarts aren�t alone. Industry players are looking into thorium, and governments from Dubai to Beijing are funding research. India is betting heavily on the element.
Kirk's blog is here:
Energy from Thorium and is worth checking out. There is a lot of Thorium in this Earth's crust -- several thousand years worth and that is without breeding new fuel. The design for the reactors is dirt simple and self regulating. Cheap to build and to run.
Glad to see other people taking an interest if not people in the USA. The path is so clear, it is strange that people are not swarming to it...
Posted by DaveH at December 21, 2009 7:46 PM