January 7, 2013

Here's how you do it - energy from Thorium

From the UK Telegraph:
China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium
Princeling Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, is spearheading a project for China's National Academy of Sciences with a start-up budget of $350m.

He has already recruited 140 PhD scientists, working full-time on thorium power at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics. He will have 750 staff by 2015.

The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium -- originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s -- opting instead for new generation of thorium reactors that produce far less toxic waste and cannot blow their top like Fukushima.

"China is the country to watch," said Baroness Bryony Worthington, head of the All-Parliamentary Group on Thorium Energy, who visited the Shanghai operations recently with a team from Britain's National Nuclear Laboratory.

"They are really going for it, and have talented researchers. This could lead to a massive break-through."
The reactors are intrinsically safe and the waste products only need to be sequestered for about 300 years. Under certain operating conditions, these reactors can burn up Uranium reactor waste and recycle the materials into more fuel. A Uranium reactors fuel has to be pulled when it is 5% contaminated as the contaminants "poison" the fission and cause a significant loss of power. Thorium reactors can be run for 70% of fuel contamination before recycling is needed. A bit more:
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee built such a reactor in the 1960s. It was shelved by the Nixon Administration. The Pentagon needed plutonium residue from uranium to build nuclear bombs. The imperatives of the Cold War prevailed.

The thorium blueprints gathered dust in the archives until retrieved and published by former Nasa engineer Kirk Sorensen. The US largely ignored him: China did not.
We had it running and we shelved it because Thorium does not go Ka-Boom and we needed something that went Ka-Boom. And then, there is this:
Mr Jiang estimates that China has enough thorium to power its electricity needs for "20,000 years".
The USA is running about the same number -- thorium is cheap and plentiful in the earths crust. It is the way to go... Posted by DaveH at January 7, 2013 9:45 AM
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