Thorium in the news - India and Norway
Thorium Nuclear Reactors are happening everywhere but here - a two-fer:
First - from
Singularity Hub:
Norway Begins Four Year Test Of Thorium Nuclear Reactor
A Norwegian company is breaking with convention and switching to an alternative energy it hopes will be safer, cleaner and more efficient. But this isn�t about ditching fossil fuels, but rather about making the switch from uranium to thorium. Oslo based Thor Energy is pairing up with the Norwegian government and US-based (but Japanese/Toshiba owned) Westinghouse to begin a four year test that they hope will dispel doubts and make thorium the rule rather than the exception. The thorium will run at a government reactor in Halden.
Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius who named it after the Norse god of thunder, Thor. Found in trace amounts in rocks and soil, thorium is actually about three times more abundant than uranium.
The attractiveness of thorium has led others in the past to build their own thorium reactors. A reactor operated in Germany between 1983 and 1989, and three operated in the US between the late sixties and early eighties. These plants were abandoned, some think, because the plutonium produced at uranium reactors was deemed indispensable to many in a Cold War world.
The
Thor Energy link is a good one -- lots of information at the site.
Second - from
India Today:
Design of world's first Thorium based nuclear reactor is ready
Finally, the wait is over. The design of World's first Thorium based nuclear reactor is ready.
India Today Online brings you the first look of design and prototype of the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor, also termed as AHWR.
It is the latest Indian design for a next-generation nuclear reactor that will burn thorium as its fuel ore.
The design is being developed at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), in Mumbai, India and aims to meet the objectives of using thorium fuel cycles for commercial power generation.
The AHWR is a vertical pressure tube type reactor cooled by boiling light water under natural circulation. The unique feature of this design is a large tank of water on top of the primary containment of vessel, called the gravity-driven water pool (GDWP). This reservoir is designed to perform several passive safety functions.
Dr R K Sinha, chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, in an exclusive interview to India Today Online said, "This reactor could function without an operator for 120 days."
We could be up and running in ten years and say goodbye to 60% of fossil fuel use with zero need for windmills or solar farms. The added plus is that these reactors can burn up our spent uranium fuel. After everything is done, the worst of the waste needs to be sequestered for a few hundred years -- a far cry from the ten thousand years for Uranium.
Posted by DaveH at February 16, 2014 1:52 PM