Thursday, December 31, 2009

Give the world the best Christmas present of all: Awareness of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors and the resulting energy abundance.

As my previous post on energy policy shows, I am a fan of nuclear power. I originally advocated fission in the short run and fusion in the long run, and I still do. But as I learned more, I came across the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) design. This solves most of the major issues that people have with nuclear power. After spending a month or so reading about LFTRs, I made the following post on Reddit with extensive links on the topic.

Enjoy.

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Originally posted at http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/aijbb/give_the_world_the_best_christmas_present_of_all/

Edit: TL;DR version: Liquid fluoride thorium nuclear reactors can solve the world's energy problems and have had working prototypes for 40 years. Let's build them.

Edit 2: If you are a US citizen, please tell your congressmen to support the Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act sponsered by Harry Reid (D-NV) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). This is a good first step.

If you haven't heard about this by now, you haven't been following Reddit very closely. The basic idea is that a class of nuclear reactors exists based on the element thorium. The thorium is dissolved in a fluoride salt and ran inside of a nuclear reactor in liquid form. This is known as a molten salt reactor (MSR), or alternatively as a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). Inside the reactor, thorium-232 is used to breed uranium-233, which is a fissile material. Fission of U-233 produces heat, which can then be used to produce power, desalinate water, generate hydrogen, and do many other useful things. Doing nuclear reactors this way has a huge number of advantages, which are discussed below.

Almost every nerd in the world is aware of the benefits of fusion reactors, but these are constantly 20 years away. Thorium reactors exist and have for a long time. The US built a test reactor called the molten salt reactor experiment (MSRE) in the 60s and it worked great. The only reason it didn't take off was because there was already a massive investment in light water reactors for various reasons and then Three Mile Island happened which created irrational fear over anything with the word "nuclear" in it.

The LFTR approach is better than current nuclear reactors in every way. It can't be easily used to make weapons because the breeding also generates U-232 (see links below for explanation), so we don't need to fear other countries using this. It produces thousands of times less in waste. The tiny amount of waste it does produce only stays radioactive for a couple hundred years. The technology is scalable from very small reactors (a few MW) to very large (10 GW). The world has four times more thorium than uranium and it doesn't require enrichment or fuel rod fabrication like uranium. It cannot have meltdowns (because the fuel is already melted) and has passive safety features that make it very safe (including the "freeze plug" design that automatically drains the reactor into a non-critical storage container if something goes wrong). The reactor can also be used to burn up old long lived nuclear waste and turn it into short lived waste.

Like other nuclear reactors, this has many advantages over other energy technologies. This directly taps into the strong nuclear force, which is the most powerful and energy dense source of energy humanity can access (this is the E in E=MC^2). It emits no carbon dioxide or other pollutants during power generation. It uses very little land. And we have enough of raw material to last for thousands, or possibly even millions, of years.

Essentially, this is the technology that can get the world off of fossil fuels immediately. The only thing we really need is massive awareness to push the government to fund the development of a commercial reactor. R&D for a commercial reactor will only cost a few billion and could have economic benefits in the quadrillions or higher. Compared to the bank bail outs, the stimulus, the military budget, the social safety net budget, and other government expenditures, this is a tiny amount of money.

Here are a bunch of resources on thorium so you can get educated on the matter. A number of these are Google Tech Talk videos that go into great detail. If you care about energy policy, you should read them all. Also, tell anyone you know that would care...

Please post additional links with useful information.

Note: this is posted in politics because the primary limit to getting this widely used is political at this point.

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