China/Japan decades ahead on Nuclear programs.

Just like peak OIL, China has a plan for depleting uranium and mounting nuclear waste problems.

Register UK - China has committed itself to establishing an entirely new nuclear energy program using thorium as a fuel, within 20 years. The LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) is a 4G reactor that uses liquid salt as both fuel and coolant. China uses the more general term TMSR (Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor).
A private company founded by Kazuo Furukawa, designer of the Fuju reactor, called International Thorium Energy and Molen-Salt Technology Inc (iThEMS) aims to produce a small (10 MW) reactor within five years. Furukawa is aiming for a retail price of 11 US cents per kWh (6.8p per kWh). The Capital of IThEMS is expected to increase to 50 million Japanese yen soon (US$600,000, but they need $300 million to push ahead)
The UK Guardian describes the move by China to develop thorium nuclear reactors
Thorium Energy Conference- The Chinese announcement refers to a 20 year program, but rapid progress can be expected in the next 5 years towards a demonstration plant. China's program is well funded but Japan's is not well funded. Japan and other countries could be motivated to step up funding with true competition from China.

MiniFUJI
Development of the micro-mini thorium molten-salt power plant 'miniFUJI'.
Since smaller thorium molten-salt power plant is easier to construct, we will develop the 10,000kW micro-mini thorium molten-salt power plant 'miniFUJI' within five years. This micro-mini power plant is planned as a local power plant to meet the high need of power supply for servers in information industry and for the stations of charging electric vehicles.

Scaling thorium up to global scale
A Road Map for the Realization of Global-scale Thorium Breeding Fuel Cycle This describes a 5-7 year doubling time for the Uranium 233 that is needed to start the molten salt thorium reactors.

The Thorium Molten-Salt Nuclear Energy Synergetic System [THORIMS-NES], described here is a symbiotic system, based on the Thorium-Uranium-233 cycle. ...FUJI reactor and the AMSB can also be used for the transmutation of long-lived radioactive elements in the wastes, and has a high potential for producing hydrogen-fuel in molten salt reactors. The development and launching of THORIMS-NES requires the following three programs during the next three decades: (A) pilot plant: miniFUJI (7-10 MWe): (B) small power reactor: FUJI-Pu (100-300MWe). (C) fissile producer: AMSB for globally deploying THORIMS-NES

Chloride fast reactors and highly enriched uranium and plutonium can be used to start a lot of reactor

How much uranium-233 do we need? Well, most of the studies done by Oak Ridge in the 1960s indicated that we could start a one-gigawatt thorium reactor with about 1 tonne of uranium-233. How much do we have right now? About one tonne. So we could only start one reactor, right? With uranium-233, yes, but we need to go about quickly "converting" our fissile materials into uranium-233 so we can start more. 

We don't have to limit ourselves to just uranium-233 to start these thorium reactors. We can use the highly-enriched uranium that we're recovering from all of the nuclear weapons that we are decommissioning to help us. We can use the plutonium we're recovering from those weapons. We can use the plutonium that's been generated in our reactors over the last sixty years to help us. By using slowed-down neutrons and thorium, the startup power of this fuel is magnified by about 1000 to 1500% over a fast reactor...a fast reactor that is a cousin to the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, except it will be one that will use liquid-chloride salts that are chemically stable as a fuel and coolant, not the liquid-sodium-metal that is currently proposed. Again, just like other fast reactors it will take 5-10 tonnes of these transuranics to produce a gigawatt of power. So what have we bought by this approach? Just this—in these liquid-chloride reactors we will jacket the reactor with a thorium blanket and make new uranium-233 even as we are destroying plutonium. That means that for each year we burn plutonium, we'll make enough uranium-233 to start a new LFTR. Compared to the fast reactor approach where you're trying to breed plutonium to build more fast breeders, and it takes 20-30 years to produce enough new fuel in a fast reactor to start another one, we won't be using these chloride fast reactors to start other fast reactors. We'll be using them to make the fuel to start fluoride thorium reactors that use slowed-down neutrons.

With this approach, plutonium from weapons and reactor fuel will start about 70 chloride fast reactors. Each one will make enough uranium-233 each year to start 70 new LFTRs at a gigawatt each. That means that in less than 20 years we could have 1000 LFTRs online, generating all of the energy our nation needs, all the while we're burning down and destroying the plutonium we've generated over the last 60 years for weapons and from reactor operation. Compare that to the standard fast breeder approach where in 20 years the 70 fast breeders we started have generated enough new fuel for another 70 fast breeders and you can see really quickly how fast uranium-233 and slowed-down neutrons can let you move ahead and replace coal and other fossil fuels.

So a country like say China that has Plutonium and highly enriched Uranium and was less concerned about using it, can start up a lot of Thorium reactors... if China was primarily concerned with making an energy transition off of coal which was killing almost one million Chinese per year from air pollution.

Read full from NBF -  "China's Thorium Reactor and Japan's targets 10 MW thorium miniFuji for 2016"

Haase - Someone may want to ask Clinton and Congress what happened to the future of Fast Reactors in the U.S. Spoiler "We would already have them online, with no coal crisis and no waste to put in Yucca." 

Read more on this site about thorium tech

• Thorium theory - giving dumb nuclear a brain and a chance...
• Bill Gates and Google looking to Invest in Thorium Energy
• Fast Breeders are Key to Fertile Nuclear Future
• Uranium Is So Last Century... Enter Thorium
• Dismantle military stockpiles and power future beyond 30 years
• 1/2 cost of current reactors & uses almost all nuclear fuel.
• US Energy Independence by a thorium nut
• Unless new breed of reactors are used 'peak uranium' will implode nuclear renaissance

China Starts Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Project

The Energy From Thorium blog reports, that The People's Republic of China has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology, it was announced in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual conference on Tuesday, January 25. An article in the Wenhui News followed on Wednesday (Google English translation). Chinese researchers also announced this development on the Energy from Thorium Discussion Forum.

Led by Dr. Jiang Mianheng, a graduate of Drexel University in electrical engineering, 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.

A Chinese delegation led by Dr. Jiang travelled to Oak Ridge National Lab last fall to learn more about MSR technology and told lab leadership of their plans to develop a thorium-fueled MSR.

The Chinese also recognize that a thorium-fueled MSR is best run with uranium-233 fuel, which inevitably contains impurities (uranium-232 and its decay products) that preclude its use in nuclear weapons. Operating an MSR on the "pure" fuel cycle of thorium and uranium-233 means that a breakeven conversion ratio can be achieved, and after being started on uranium-233, only thorium is required for indefinite operation and power generation.

Currently there is no US effort to develop a thorium MSR.
Readers of this blog and Charles Barton's Nuclear Green blog know that there has been a grass-roots effort underway for over five years to change this. The formation of the Thorium Energy Alliance and the International Thorium Energy Organization have been attempts to convince governmental and industrial leaders to carefully consider the potential of thorium in a liquid-fluoride reactor. There have been many international participants in the TEA and IThEO conferences, but none from China.

Chinese energy demand is growing rapidly, and despite the world's largest campaign of new nuclear construction, the vast majority of Chinese power generation still comes from fossil fuels. China has abundant supplies of coal, but their combustion has led to some of the worst air quality in the world. The ability of thorium MSRs to operate at atmospheric pressure and with simplified safety systems means that these reactors could be built in factories and mass-produced. They could then be shipped to operational sites with standard transportation.

Their thorium fuel is compact and inexpensive.
Chinese rare-earth miners have been rumored to have been stockpiling thorium from rare-earth mining for years, and if this is true, the Chinese will have hundreds of thousands of years of thorium already mined and available for use.

The Chinese now have the largest national effort to develop thorium molten-salt reactors. Whether other nations will follow is an open question.

Read more From Thorium blog

Ending Yucca discussions with 300 times more efficient reactors

The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm - From the Drum

Excitement has recently been rising about the possibility of using thorium as a low-carbon way of generating vast amounts of electricity. The use of thorium as a nuclear fuel was extensively studied by Oak Ridge National Laboratory between 1950 and 1976, but was dropped, because unlike uranium-fueled Light Water Reactors (LWRs), it could not generate weapons' grade plutonium. Research on the possible use of thorium as a nuclear fuel has continued around the world since then. Famed Climate Scientist James Hanson, recently spoke of thorium's great promise in material that he submitted to President Elect Obama:

   The Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is a thorium reactor concept that uses a chemically-stable fluoride salt for the medium in which nuclear reactions take place. This fuel form yields flexibility of operation and eliminates the need to fabricate fuel elements. This feature solves most concerns that have prevented thorium from being used in solid-fueled reactors. The fluid fuel in LFTR is also easy to process and to separate useful fission products, both stable and radioactive. LFTR also has the potential to destroy existing nuclear waste.

    (The) LFTR(s) operate at low pressure and high temperatures, unlike today’s LWRs. Operation at low pressures alleviates much of the accident risk with LWR. Higher temperatures enable more of the reactor heat to be converted to electricity (50% in LFTR vs 35% in LWR). (The) LFTR (has) the potential to be air-cooled and to use waste heat for desalinating water.

    LFTR(s) are 100-300 times more fuel efficient than LWRs. In addition to solving the nuclear waste problem, they can operate for several centuries using only uranium and thorium that has already been mined. Thus they eliminate the criticism that mining for nuclear fuel will use fossil fuels and add to the greenhouse effect.

    The Obama campaign, properly in my opinion, opposed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. Indeed, there is a far more effective way to use the $25 billion collected from utilities over the past 40 years to deal with waste disposal. This fund should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste. By law the federal government must take responsibility for existing spent nuclear fuel, so inaction is not an option. Accelerated development of fast and thorium reactors will allow the US to fulfill its obligations to dispose of the nuclear waste, and open up a source of carbon-free energy that can last centuries, even millennia.

    It is commonly assumed that 4th generation nuclear power will not be ready before 2030. That is a safe assumption under "business-as-usual”. However, given high priority it is likely that it could be available sooner. It is specious to argue that R&D on 4th generation nuclear power does not deserve support because energy efficiency and renewable energies may be able to satisfy all United States electrical energy needs. Who stands ready to ensure that energy needs of China and India will be entirely met by efficiency and renewables?

Nor would exhausting the USAEC’s 1969 estimated thorium reserve exhaust the American thorium supply. Even at average concentrations in the earth’s rocks, thorium can be recovered with a good EROEI, without making the cost of electricity impossibly expensive.  Read more from the Drum

Comment 1 of 456  that make inarugable facts.... 
My complaint about renewable advocates is that they tend to not look carefully at their ideas before they turn them into slogans.. it always amuses me when renewables advocates get carried away and imagine that Jevons paradox and the law of thermodynamics can be repealed.

While I favor energy efficiency I am not under any illusion that it can lead to a greatly diminished energy demand. Energy efficient makes energy cheaper, and the history of modern civilization tells us that cheap energy will always find its uses.

Negawatts is a bumper sticker slogan, not a solution to our energy issues. The words "smart grid" are held to have magic powers when spooken or written by renewables advocates, who seldome tell us what a smart grid will and will dont do, and even less frequently tell us what a smart grid will cost.

HVDC lines are expensive as is energy storage. Both are nice, but the expense will be a serious impediment to fighting global warming. Mixing renewables means replicating generating capacity. Replicating energy capacity is also very expensive. Building LFTRs would be far cheaper that as mixed system of renewables. Using existing peaking plants means producing CO2, so it is not a post carbon solution. Electrified transportation will not work well with negawatts. You need more rather than less electricity to make an electrified transportation system work.

Concepts & Prototypes: Two Next-Gen Nukes

PopSci - Nuclear power is the most efficient emissions-free energy available. But can it be made safe? Two new reactor designs do just that

In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in March, the appetite for new nuclear power plants slipped to post-Chernobyl lows. Regulators from Italy to Switzerland to Texas moved to stop pending nuclear-power projects, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began to reevaluate the safety of all domestic plants. Yet nuclear power still provides 20 percent of America's total electric power and 70 percent of its emissions-free energy, in large part because no alternative energy source can match its efficiency.

One nuclear plant with a footprint of one square mile provides the energy equivalent of 20 square miles of solar panels, 1,200 windmills or the entire Hoover Dam. If the country wants to significantly reduce its dependence on carbon-based energy, it will need to build more nuclear power plants. The question is how to do so safely.

In the 30 years since regulators last approved the construction of a new nuclear plant in the U.S., engineers have improved reactor safety considerably. (You can see some of the older, not-so-safe ones in this sweet gallery.) The newest designs, called Generation III+, are just beginning to come online. (Generation I plants were early prototypes; Generation IIs were built from the 1960s to the 1990s and include the facility at Fukushima; and Generation IIIs began operating in the late 1990s, though primarily in Japan, France and Russia.)

Unlike their predecessors, most Generation III+ reactors have layers of passive safety elements designed to stave off a meltdown, even in the event of power loss. Construction of the first Generation III+ reactors is well under way in Europe. China is also in the midst of building at least 30 new plants. In the U.S., the Southern Company recently broke ground on the nation's first Generation III+ reactors at the Vogtle nuclear plant near Augusta, Georgia. The first of two reactors is due to come online in 2016.

Like many of the 20 or so pending Generation III+ facilities in the U.S., the Vogtle plant will house Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. A light-water reactor, the AP1000 prompts uranium-235 into a chain reaction that throws off high-energy neutrons. The particles heat water into steam, which then turns a turbine that generates electricity.

The greatest danger in a nuclear plant is a meltdown, in which solid reactor fuel overheats, melts, and ruptures its containment shell, releasing radioactive material. (Want more information? Check out our explainer on how nuclear reactors work--and how they fail.) Like most reactors, the AP1000 is cooled with electrically powered water pumps and fans, but it also has a passive safety system, which employs natural forces such as gravity, condensation and evaporation to cool a reactor during a power outage.

The U.S. has 104 nuclear reactors operating at 65 sites in 31 states, all of them approved before 1980.A central feature of this system is an 800,000-gallon water tank positioned directly above the containment shell. The reservoir's valves rely on electrical power to remain closed. When power is lost, the valves open and the water flows down toward the containment shell. Vents passively draw air from outside and direct it over the structure, furthering the evaporative cooling.

Depending on the type of emergency, an additional reservoir within the containment shell can be manually released to flood the reactor. As water boils off, it rises and condenses at the top of the containment shell and streams back down to cool the reactor once more. Unlike today's plants, most of which have enough backup power onsite to last just four to eight hours after grid power is lost, the AP1000 can safely operate for at least three days without power or human intervention.

Even with their significant safety improvements, Generation III+ plants can, theoretically, melt down. Some people within the nuclear industry are calling for the implementation of still newer reactor designs, collectively called Generation IV. The thorium-powered molten-salt reactor (MSR) is one such design. In an MSR, liquid thorium would replace the solid uranium fuel used in today's plants, a change that would make meltdowns all but impossible

MSRs were developed at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1960s and ran for a total of 22,000 hours between 1965 and 1969. "These weren't theoretical reactors or thought experiments," says engineer John Kutsch, who heads the nonprofit Thorium Energy Alliance. "[Engineers] really built them, and they really ran." Of the handful of Generation IV reactor designs circulating today, only the MSR has been proven outside computer models. "It was not a full system, but it showed you could successfully design and operate a molten-salt reactor," says Oak Ridge physicist Jess Gehin, a senior program manager in the lab's Nuclear Technology Programs office.

One pound of thorium produces as much power as 300 pounds of uranium--or 3.5 million pounds of coal.The MSR design has two primary safety advantages. Its liquid fuel remains at much lower pressures than the solid fuel in light-water plants. This greatly decreases the likelihood of an accident, such as the hydrogen explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Further, in the event of a power outage, a frozen salt plug within the reactor melts and the liquid fuel passively drains into tanks where it solidifes, stopping the fission reaction. "The molten-salt reactor is walk-away safe," Kutsch says. "If you just abandoned it, it had no power, and the end of the world came--a comet hit Earth--it would cool down and solidify by itself."

Although an MSR could also run on uranium or plutonium, using the less-radioactive element thorium, with a little plutonium or uranium as a catalyst, has both economic and safety advantages. Thorium is four times as abundant as uranium and is easier to mine, in part because of its lower radioactivity. The domestic supply could serve the U.S.'s electricity needs for centuries. Thorium is also exponentially more efficient than uranium. "In a traditional reactor, you're burning up only a half a percent to maybe 3 percent of the uranium," Kutsch says. "In a molten-salt reactor, you're burning 99 percent of the thorium." The result: One pound of thorium yields as much power as 300 pounds of uranium--or 3.5 million pounds of coal.

Because of this efficiency, a thorium MSR would produce far less waste than today's plants. Uranium-based waste will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years. With thorium, it's more like a few hundred. As well, raw thorium is not fissile in and of itself, so it is not easily weaponized. "It can't be used as a bomb," Kutsch says. "You could have 1,000 pounds in your basement, and nothing would happen."

One nuclear plant provides the energy equivalent of 1,200 windmills or 20 square miles of solar panels.Without the need for large cooling towers, MSRs can be much smaller than typical light-water plants, both physically and in power capacity. Today's average nuclear power plant generates about 1,000 megawatts. A thorium-fueled MSR might generate as little as 50 megawatts. Smaller, more numerous plants could save on transmission loss (which can be up to 30 percent on the present grid). The U.S. Army is interested in using MSRs to power individual bases, Kutsch says, and Google, which relies on steady power to keep its servers running, held a conference on thorium reactors last year. "The company would love to have a 70- or 80-megawatt reactor sitting next door to a data center," Kutsch says.

Even with military and corporate support, the transition to a new type of nuclear power generation is likely to be slow, at least in the U.S. Light-water reactors are already established, and no regulations exist to govern other reactor designs. Outside the U.S., the transition could come more quickly. In January the Chinese government launched a thorium reactor program. "The Chinese Academy of Sciences has approved development of an MSR with relatively near-term deployment--maybe 10 years," says Gehin, who thinks the Chinese decision may increase work on the technology worldwide. Even after Fukushima, "there's still interest in advanced nuclear," he says. "I don't see that changing."

Concerned about the future of energy? Click here for more.

Solve the energy AND rare earth crisis: Join the Thorium Bank | @SmartPlanet

@SmartPlanet - Put this idea into the “killing two birds with one stone” category.

The “birds” in this case are nothing less than two great economic and environmental challenges facing the West: How to establish carbon-free, sustainable energy independence, and how to cut reliance on China for the rare earth metals vital to products ranging from missiles to mobile phones.

The “stone” is literally a stone - okay, a rock - called monazite.

As I’ve noted before on SmartPlanet, monazite is a mineral rich in rare earth elements, and also in thorium, the element that could replace uranium and usher in a future of safe, efficient nuclear power that helps cut the fossil fuel cord and that greatly reduces nuclear waste hazards including weapons proliferation.

Two problems: Most countries in the West lack policy that supports thorium nuclear. Likewise, countries like the U.S. years ago took measures that handed the rare earth business to China.

Co-operative Kennedy. Jim Kennedy speaking in Chicago recently.

Another issue: Although mining monazite in say, the U.S., could help free the country from China’s rare earth shackles, the presence of thorium in the rock discourages such initiative. That’s because - with no federal thorium nuclear approval in place - mildly radioactive thorium is a costly rare earth byproduct that someone has to safely store away.

You would think it’s high time to solve this riddle.

Jim Kennedy’s Thorium Bank to the rescue!

Kennedy, one of the organizers of the recent Thorium Energy Alliance Conference in Chicago, made a compelling case at the conference for Congress to authorize - but not fund - a “cooperative” responsible for not only taking the thorium off the hands of rare earth mining companies, but also for developing thorium uses and markets, including energy.

Please continue reading at:

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/solve-the-energy-and-rare-earth-crisis-join-the-thorium-bank/17845

Thorium theory - giving dumb nuclear a brain and a chance...

No one can disagree that nuclear power done wrong can have 'earth changing' effects, but few can agree that modern man can handle all of the waste, cost, water and safety issues surrounding nuclear energy as a replacement for fossil fuels.

Can Thorium theory and Fast Breed save nuclear's and our future? Maybe.

Here is some further insight into both:
Can thorium save the planet? - Prof Bob Cywinski, Huddersfield University
IT is impossible to open a newspaper without reading about climate change.
What is worse is that we are told that it is our fault because it is the carbon produced by the fuels we burn for transport and for energy generation that is driving global warming.

If this is the case, then prospects are gloomy:
the growth in global population stands at 165,000 per day. Assuming each of these new arrivals uses no more energy on average than current inhabitants of the planet then, just to meet their needs, we will have to build the equivalent of a gigawatt power station somewhere in the world every single day. All of these new power stations, if fuelled with conventional fuels such as oil, gas or coal, will pump an additional 1,300 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in just one year!

Surprisingly, even if we resorted to "clean" wind power, the cost of building and servicing the windmills would be an extra 13 million tons of carbon annually, not to mention the additional 80 thousand square miles needed for wind farms each year... and we would have to pray that the wind kept blowing!

These are the reasons that the Government has suggested that we simply cannot afford to ignore nuclear power, an energy source with a carbon cost only half that of wind. The problem is that, whether rationally or irrationally, public perception of nuclear power is coloured by issues of safety, the radiotoxicity of its waste, its links to nuclear weapon proliferation and concerns about its vulnerability to terrorism.

Clearly the nuclear option is very controversial. But perhaps there is a more acceptable nuclear alternative.

Thorium is four times more plentiful than uranium.
More importantly only 5,000 tons of thorium can produce all the energy needed by the planet for a whole year. Although thorium itself doesn't undergo fission, it can be converted to fissile fuel in an energy amplifier. As thorium is burned, unlike uranium, it produces no plutonium, the highly toxic and potent ingredient of nuclear weapons.

In fact, existing plutonium stocks and other nuclear waste can even be burnt as fuel in an energy amplifier, rendering it safe for future generations
Clearly the energy amplifier has the potential to fill the gap of carbon-free nuclear power stations with a safer, cheaper and more sustainable form of nuclear power.

Huddersfield University and scientists from the universities of Manchester and Cambridge, are now developing a viable, cost-effective energy amplifier design developments and offer encouragement to research which might just save the planet. Read full from Prof Bob Cywinski here

Research more:

• The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm
• The Oil Drum | "thorium"
• Energy from Thorium
• Thorium Paradigm | Channel 94
• How Uranium Depletion Affects World Economics
• Fast breeder reactor 101
• Fast breeder reactor - Wikipedia
• How do fast breeder reactors differ from regular nuclear power

Pocket Particle Accelerators Like This One Could Bring Safer Nuclear Power to Neighborhoods

pOPsCI Meet EMMA, the Electron Model of Many Applications

A wee particle accelerator in the English countryside could be a harbinger of a safer, cleaner future of energy. Specifically, nuclear energy, but not the type that has wrought havoc in Japan and controversy throughout Europe and the U.S. It would be based on thorium, a radioactive element that is much more abundant, and much more safe, than traditional sources of nuclear power.

Some advocates believe small nuclear reactors powered by thorium could wean the world off coal and natural gas, and do it more safely than traditional nuclear. Thorium is not only abundant, but more efficient than uranium or coal - one ton of the silver metal can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium, or 3.5 million tons of coal, as the Mail on Sunday calculates it.

The newspaper took a tour of a small particle accelerator that could be used to power future thorium reactors. Nicknamed EMMA - the Electron Model of Many Applications - the accelerator would be used to jump-start fissile nuclear reactions inside a small-scale thorium power plant.

Thorium reactors would not melt down, in part because they require an external input to produce fission. Thorium atoms would release energy when bombarded by high-energy neutrons, such as the type supplied in a particle accelerator.

Providing that stimulus is one obstacle to building small thorium reactors - but a new generation of accelerators like EMMA, and someday potentially even smaller, luggage-sized ones - could do the job.

EMMA is the first non- scaling, fixed-field, alternating-gradient (NS-FFAG) accelerator, qualities that make it easier to operate and maintain, more reliable and compact, more flexible and more efficient, according to British researchers. Other particle accelerators use alternating electric fields, which require special safety measures to guard against microwave exposure, for instance. EMMA's alternating magnetic field gradients are a more efficient and cheaper way to accelerate particles to higher energies. (Brookhaven National Laboratory explains in more detail here.)

EMMA operates at operates around 20 MeV, or 20 million electronvolts, a paltry amount for an atom accelerator. The Tevatron, for instance, accelerates particles to 1 tera-electron volts. The Large Hadron Collider is designed to speed them to 7 TeV. But thorium reactors would not need such high energies to initiate fusion.

British scientists are already working on a successor called PAMELA, the Particle Accelerator for Medical Applications, which will be used to treat cancer.

Click through to the Mail for a full tour of EMMA, its sister apparatus ALICE (Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments), and a description of British efforts to produce thorium power.

Read more at Mail on Sunday

My favorite comment from post:

Every couple of months we have a new technology that is going to revolutionise energy generation and save the planet (fusion reactors, genetically engineered algae - producing ethanol, high flying wind turbines, now this - thorium reactors, probably a load of other ideas ...). We also have some of the best wind and tidal resources in the world. Why on earth aren't we blazing away and revelling in cutting edge technology and embracing the potential that we have? Ah yes, it's because our glorious leaders are too incompetent and incapable of inspiring us. Plus their close friends in big business would rather we carried on paying extortionate prices, through a policy of scare mongering and the maintenance of cartels. To summarise; the rich carry on getting ever richer at the expense of the rest of us. Never mind, China or the USA will develop the technology and then sell it back to us at the usual insane price that we'll be happy to pay.- The von Horn, Shambury, Oxfordshire

 

Uranium Is So Last Century... Enter Thorium

Little progress in 50 year old theory - reinventing cold war energy
WIRED- Published in 1958 ....what caught Sorensen's eye was the description of Weinberg's experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
..., 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.

The concept of nuclear power without waste or proliferation has obvious political appeal in the US, as well. The threat of climate change has created an urgent demand for carbon-free electricity, and the 52,000 tons of spent, toxic material that has piled up around the country makes traditional nuclear power less attractive. President Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have expressed general support for a nuclear renaissance. Utilities are investigating several next-gen alternatives, including scaled-down conventional plants and "pebble bed" reactors, in which the nuclear fuel is inserted into small graphite balls in a way that reduces the risk of meltdown.

Those technologies are still based on uranium, however, and will be beset by the same problems that have dogged the nuclear industry since the 1960s. It is only thorium, Sorensen and his band of revolutionaries argue, that can move the country toward a new era of safe, clean, affordable energy.

CEO Seth Grae thinks it's better business to convert existing reactors than it is to build new ones. "We're just trying to replace leaded fuel with unleaded," he says. "You don't have to replace engines or build new gas stations."...For Sorensen, putting thorium into a conventional reactor is a half measure, like putting biofuel in a Hummer. But he acknowledges that the seed-and-blanket design has potential to get the country on its way to a greener, safer nuclear future. "The real enemy is coal," he says. "I want to fight it with LFTRs — which are like machine guns — instead of with light-water reactors, which are like bayonets. But when the enemy is spilling into the trench, you affix bayonets and go to work."

The thorium battalion is small, but — as nuclear physics demonstrates — tiny forces can yield powerful effects.

Please read full at WIRED

The new face of safe nuclear | SmartPlanet

“After Fukushima, everybody is asking whether nuclear power can be safe,” Sorensen (pictured, below) said in an interview. His resounding answer is “yes.”

But it will take nothing less than for the industry to shift from its conventional reactor designs and from the uranium 235 fuel process on which it began to settle in the 1960s, according to Sorensen.

Instead, he says, it has to adopt a liquid thorium technology similar to what nuclear developers built in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, but that lost out (pictured above).

“In the 40s and 50s they had an expansive definition of what nuclear power was – it wasn’t just solid fuel uranium reactors,” said Sorensen, who is Flibe’s president. “But that’s what it has come to mean now.”

Thorium lost in part because it did not create lethal waste - plutonium - that could be used to make bombs the way uranium did. In the heat of the Cold War, the U.S. government and military demanded such deadly material. (Oak Ridge originated in the 1940s to support the Manhattan Project, which developed the world’s first atomic bomb).

Today, other countries including China and India are pursuing thorium nuclear projects. Sorensen believes that thorium should be the pillar of an American nuclear future, because thorium “is so fundamentally different than every other nuclear story out there right now.”

Because his thorium reactor would not produce plutonium, it would mitigate the chance of nuclear weapons proliferation and eliminate the need for utilities to bury plutonium waste.

Although thorium in some designs does produce plutonium waste, that waste is less hazardous than other mixes of plutonium waste, there’s less of it, and it decomposes much faster than conventional waste – hundreds of years rather than thousands or more, according to various thorium proponents.

And thorium-based fuel fissions much more efficiently than does uranium 235, meaning a thorium reactor requires less fuel.

Read on at: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/the-new-face-of-safe-nuclear/7712?tag=search-river

Laws against Thorium prevent Rare Earth industry from happening in North America

A multi billion dollar industry sits on hold while China dominates the market all because of outdated policies and concerns over what to do with the Thorium which is only mildly radioactive and is not water soluble. We know some companies like FLIBE Energy and others have done extensive research on how to use Thorium but the backward over zealous fear mongers in the government won’t let the industries move forward.

What is a rare earth element REE? There are 17 of them (Scandium, Yttrium, Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, Lutetium). So it is considered environmentally dangerous to mine because the tailings include Uranium and Thorium which have been known to affect the region near the tailings.

90% of the current supply of REE comes from China (mostly Mongolia) and Japan buys 60% of it. The powerful magnets created from Neodymium, Samarium, Gadolinium and Dysprosium are behind modern devices like wind turbines, computers, cellphones, medical scanners and electric cars.

A ten year supply of REEs exist under a volcanic mountain in Afghanistan totalling 1.3 million metric tons of elements including cerium and neodymium are estimated to be worth $7.4 billion. Greenland also has huge deposits. We also know the US, Mexico and Canada have significant deposits.

We know how to send a Robot to Mars and keep it running for two years yet we have trouble improving practices at the messy mining operations that give all the others a bad name. Waste water from the mines and Uranium dust are raised as concerns that potentially affect human health. Even Greenpeace recognizes that mining done correctly can actually assist in the creation of renewable energy. GP likes wind and solar but followers of this blog know that Thorium and Uranium are the ingredients we need for molten salt reactors and other types of nuclear reactors. So NRC start deregulating and give the economy and the whole world a break and let us participate in making the world a better place by allowing REE industry to grow locally.

Big business can help this process by lobbying for the changes we need and demonstrating through R and D efforts that we don’t need to store or throw away Thorium. We can use it for clean cheap energy for bothe industrial heat processes and electricity.

See video on youtube called “THE THORIUM PROBLEM – Danger of existing thorium regulation to U.S. manufacturing and energy ” at:

http://thoriummsr.com/2012/08/laws-against-thorium-prevent-rare-earth-industry-from-happening-in-north-america/

Thorium Power Canada is in advanced talks with Chile and Indonesia for 10 MW and 25 MW solid thorium fueled reactors [feedly]

The TPC (Thorium Power Canada) Thorium Reactor is a one-of-a-kind technology whose modular design can achieve any output desired at significantly reduced capital and carrying costs. The cost to build a reactor is estimated at $2.0 million per MW and can be built in 18-24 months versus conventional reactors at 5-7 years. Through a partnership with DBI, the company's thorium reactor design provides a nuclear alternative to fossil fuel consumption, taking advantage of abundant and widely available thorium deposits. The TPC Thorium Reactor has been in research & development since 1970.

Read more »

Bill Gates and Google looking ato Invest in Thorium Energy

Thorium Energy Expert: David LeBlanc "...every indication points to a power reactor that will excel in cost, safety, long-term waste reduction, resource utilization, and proliferation resistance." Read more

Bill Gates Invest in Thorium Capable Reactor Venture - Bill Gates received a standing ovation at this year's TED Conference when he talked about energy and climate. Watch Video& Read more

Google Hosted the Thorium Energy Conference at Headquarter... The Thorium Energy Alliance Conference 2, known as TEAC2 was a success! Read more


Thorium Energy Conference 2010 provide a unique and convenient, cross-disciplinary platform, for people involved in the field of thorium energy to be introduced, to speak, and to discover.  


Visit IThEO.org  for more news.

Is Safe, Green Thorium Power Finally Ready For Prime Time? - via @Slashdot

"If you've not been tracking the thorium hype, you might be interested to learn that the benefits liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) have over light water uranium reactors (LWRs) are compelling. Alvin Weinberg, who invented both, favored the LFTR for civilian power since its failures (when they happened) were considerably less dramatic — a catastrophic depressurization of radioactive steam, like occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, simply wouldn't be possible. Since the technical hurdles to building LFTRs and handling their byproducts are in theory no more challenging, one might ask — where are they? It turns out that a bunch of U.S. startups are investigating the modern-day viability of thorium power, and countries like India and China have serious, governmental efforts to use LFTRs. Is thorium power finally ready for prime time?"

Please read full and follow at:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/12/19/2112239/is-safe-green-thorium-power-finally-ready-for-prime-time

Is Safe, Green Thorium Power Finally Ready For Prime Time? - via @Slashdot

"If you've not been tracking the thorium hype, you might be interested to learn that the benefits liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) have over light water uranium reactors (LWRs) are compelling. Alvin Weinberg, who invented both, favored the LFTR for civilian power since its failures (when they happened) were considerably less dramatic — a catastrophic depressurization of radioactive steam, like occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, simply wouldn't be possible. Since the technical hurdles to building LFTRs and handling their byproducts are in theory no more challenging, one might ask — where are they? It turns out that a bunch of U.S. startups are investigating the modern-day viability of thorium power, and countries like India and China have serious, governmental efforts to use LFTRs. Is thorium power finally ready for prime time?"

Please read full and follow at:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/12/19/2112239/is-safe-green-thorium-power-finally-ready-for-prime-time

US Energy Independence by a thorium nut

The below post is about saving the death of nuclear energy through better fuel, reactor design and spent fuel management.

David Archibald's  thesis is that the rising oil price will drive inter-fuel substitution to the highest value markets, which are those transport applications that require a high-density liquid fuel with good storage characteristics – essentially diesel and jet fuel. Coal will be substituted for oil into the transport fuels market. That in turn will make it too valuable to burn for power generation, in which nuclear will substitute for coal. I (David Archibald) am a thorium nut as well as a coal-to-liquids (CTL) proponent. The nuclear industry has financed a lot of the AGW hysteria, as they saw this as the only way they could sell nuclear plants against coal. They needn't have bothered. At the current oil price and above, coal is diesel that is waiting to go through a CTL plant. At US$120 per barrel, it becomes worthwhile to close existing coal-fired power generation and replace it with nuclear, taking the hit on the capital charge of the idled coal plant.

Some people call for US energy independence but have no practical idea of how that could be achieved. Others, strangely, rail against the concept. So, here follows a plan for US energy independence by 2020. The technology exists and it is costed and affordable.

Read full post by David Archibald

More reading and presentations at:

http://www.energyfromthorium.com
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/thorium-reactors-could-wean-world-oil-just-five-years
Unless new breed of reactors are used 'peak uranium' will implode nuclear renaissance
Uranium Is So Last Century... Enter Thorium

You can also find out more by searching "thorium" on this site.