http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionA.htm#j

and

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm#uranium_supply

(http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm is also interesting and has a section on Thorium)

The Canadians, South Koreans and Indians have collaborated in various ways over the years (the Canada-India relationship is, uh, complicated, not least by the fact that Canada’s completely civilian nuclear engineering community sometimes seems congenitally unwilling to keep politically embarassing or militarily sensitive secrets (”they leak like a calandria”). CANFLEX (AECL and KAERI), DUPIC (AECL, KAERI and KNFL), once-through cycles with on-power managed piles comprising 232Th bearing sand bundles (”OTT” from AECL and BARC) and the increasing number of Korean “reburn” PWR-PHWR (AECL, KHNP-Kepco, KNFL) sites are among the results.

These developments are described on the FAQ site and Whitlock himself is an avid emailer, in case you spot errors or have questions, as noted at the bottom of the main nuclearfaq.ca page.

I agree with Ijon Tichy and Erik on nuclear power. The history of the SNR-300 reactor shows that bad decisions were made in the past which took away some of the options we could have had today.

It is feasible to produce a large fraction of all our energy needs from nuclear energy and the remaining part from renewable energy sources, such as wind power and geothermal energy. We also need to store energy, e.g. by producing hydrogen.

It is also possible to build “power islands”. You can use wind power to pump out seawater and by letting it flow back in, you can generate power at any time of the day, regardless of whether there is any wind or not.

But the main advantage of U-based reactors has nothing to do with geology- it is that they are available now- the technology is mature.

Yes, actually, I agree with you. I’m not advocating using thorium-based reactors right now, although we would be stark raving mad not to immediately start building some experimental reactors, given the obviously great potential of thorium as a source of energy.

Wind power is already cheaper than nuclear…

That is a biased and probably wrong statement. Estimating costs for various forms of power is not an exact science. Costs will vary depending on location and time, on what you count (external costs like pollution?) and what you don’t count (what about subsidies?). The best you can come up with is a range of estimates. For your statement to be true, you would have to take the lower end of the cost estimates for wind, and compare it to the higher end of the cost estimates for nuclear: that is unfair and hence biased. I say you are probably wrong, because the lower-end estimate for nuclear is a bit cheaper than the lower-end estimate for wind, the higher-end estimate for wind is significantly more expensive than the higher-end estimate for nuclear, but nevertheless there is significant overlap between the two. A fair statement would be that the average costs for wind and nuclear are in the same ballpark, but it is a bit more likely that nuclear is cheaper than wind rather than vice versa.

Feel free to prove me wrong with a superior reactor design and exploration plan.

Well I think the superior reactor design for thorium is already well-known: molten-salt reactors, and in particular, the liquid-fluoride variety. An experimental reactor based on this design was actually built and run successfully at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, over 40 years ago, and you can read about that project here.

It’s sad that logical reasoning is no longer used when discussing energy issues. The fear of nuclear energy is so ingrained that it is not considered even when: *environmental disaster is looming
*people starve when alternative energy is used
*the US economy is bleeding dollars to oil producing dictatorships

Technically, with nuclear energy, it wouldn’t even be to difficult to produce carbon neutral fuels for use in vehicles.

e.g. 2 years? The reason I got hired was that all the uranium geologists with work experience are now in their late 60’s or older. Nobody has looked for U since Three Mile Island flattened western demand when I was 6 years old.

Also, Monazite deposits occur in a subset of titanium/zirconium heavy sands deposits, which have been in keen demand ever since we started building rockets and gave up lead paint. So the accidental byproduct exploration for Th has actually been greater than for U, as Th deposits are cogenetic with other valuable minerals, while high grade U isn’t.

As for the ore grade, consider the Western Australia mineral sands, which are one of the more Th-rich deposits. The Th here has been studied extensively for radiological hazard work resulting from dust inhalation. The mineral sands (zircon+ilmenite+rutile+monazite) generally grade 10%, of which 2% is monazite. The monazite there has a Th content of around 5%. So the Th content for the deposit is 5% of 2% of 10%, or 100ppm. (numbers from http://earthsci.org/mineral/mindep/depfile/minsand.htm )

100ppm of 235U requires a total U grade of 13888pmm, or around 1.4%. This is a few times higher than most producing Australian mines. Canadian mines are much higher grade, however- generally around 20%U, or 1440ppm 235U.

There do exist some obscure high Th rocks (high being a percent or two)- one happens to be in the roadcut of a major US freeway (to find which one, start driving around with a scintillometer in your car). But they are small, rare, poorly understood, and not easy to look for.

But the main advantage of U-based reactors has nothing to do with geology- it is that they are available now- the technology is mature. Th may be competitive in a few decades, but by that time, renewables will probably be cheaper. Wind power is already cheaper than nuclear- it just has stability/storage issues.

I’m all for burning today’s Th byproduct in a reactor- it makes a lot more sense than disposing of it as radioactive waste- but I think that assuming that this technology can support civilization is a bit premature. Feel free to prove me wrong with a superior reactor design and exploration plan.

This [i.e. the fact that thorium is four times more abundant than uranium -- I.T.] is a perfect example of a statistic that is both technically true and practically irrelevant.

L.L., you are wrong in one sense, and right in another sense. I have two explanations: long-winded and short.

Long-Winded Explanation:

As you explained in your nice blog post, the chemical properties of thorium (Th) are such that it is more difficult for natural geological processes to concentrate it than they can concentrate uranium (U). How much more difficult? One obvious way is to compare the bulk Th:U ratio to the ratio of Th reserves to U reserves. Estimates of Th reserves are sketchy: quite a few countries do not report, and there has been even less exploration of Th than of U. I have seen Th reserves estimates ranging from between 1.2 million tons and 2.5 million tons (these are only reasonably assured reserves). Give Th the intensity of exploration that U has enjoyed, and I do not think it unreasonable to expect that the amount of Th reserves would be similar to the amount of U reserves. So perhaps 4 times more difficult, perhaps more. In any case, on the question of how much thorium we can extract out of the ground, you are wrong that the bulk Th:U ratio is irrelevant: it is relevant precisely because of the relative difficulty of finding rich deposits of Th in the crust. Imagine if the bulk ratio was the other way around, i.e. U/Th was 4. Then the Th boosters would have much less of a case.

Fortunately, the case for Th does not rest entirely on the bulk Th:U ratio. In fact, most of the case rests on something else, something further down the ore-electricity line. It’s something I already mentioned in an earlier post: only 0.7% of the U extracted from the ground is used to generate electricity (i.e. the U-235 isotope), while in a Th reactor, virtually all of the Th is usable (after converting to U-233 via a cheap, efficient process of neutron bombardment). Since the output energies per atomic unit of mass are similar for both sets of fission reactions, we just need to compare 100% to 0.7% to get a rough idea of how much more “energy-rich” a given mass of Th is to a given mass of U: at least two orders of magnitude. So on the question of how much energy you can extract from the world’s supply of thorium, you are right: the bulk Th:U ratio is not very relevant, because it is a significand issue, and we are concerned mostly with the exponent.

Short Explanation

Current thorium reserves are probably not much less than uranium reserves. All of the thorium, compared to only 0.7% of the uranium, can be used in the energy generation process. Notice the two orders of magnitude difference: that gives us a good amount to play with on the relatively uncertain issue of thorium reserves.

It is also irrelevant to my point, which was this:

India, due to a shortage of uranium, has no economic uranium mines. That is, there are no places where the total cost of finding, digging up, and refining uranium is less than the current market price.

Due to their weapons program, India mines uneconomic uranium for bombs. It can do this because bombmaking is not an economic activity, so they expect to lose money.

Because they make bombs, most uranium producing countries will not sell uranium to India for any purpose, for fear that it might end up getting used for military applications.

Therefore, the price of uranium in India is artificially high. It is this unusually high local uranium price that makes thorium reactors economic there, but not in the open market.

Krishna, I do believe that thorium reactors are preferable to coal, especially in countries like India with lax emissions laws.

As for the wisdom of nuclear weapons, it is my personal opinion that India should stop making atomic bombs and instead concentrate on weaponizing Harbhajan Singh. In the case of an attack by Pakistan or China, India could fire the off-break spinner into Beijing or Islamabad, where he can personally bitch-slap whoever ordered the attack.

“Richard Butler…had known of and co-operated with a US electronic eavesdropping operation that allowed intelligence agents to monitor military communications in Iraq. This was confirmed by UNSCOM insider Rod Barton on Australian television in February 2005. This intelligence was used to target US air attacks on Iraq.”