Safe Nuclear Power

[Airbrush]

What if when the first cars were invented, there was a collision between two cars and both gas tanks exploded and killed the people driving the cars?  Was that an indicator that the internal combustion engine was unsafe and could never be useful in cars?  No.  Something like that may be going on with nuclear power.  Just because the early nuclear reactors were not safe enough, does not mean that they will never be safe.  Here are some ideas for safe nuclear reactors, thorium molten salt, and the Natrium reactor.

Comments to this video:

"Advantages of thorium:  Much safer than uranium-no pressure vessel, no fuel rods to melt down.  Much simpler reactor.  Thorium salt liquid is pumped from the reactor tank through a heat exchanger and back into the tank.  Thorium is much more plentiful than uranium--in fact so plentiful it is considered a waste product from rare earth mining.  Thorium doesn't need expensive enriching to make it usable.  Thorium is of little use for weapons.  If power goes off, liquid simply drains into a pit which stops reaction.  No fuel rods to cool or melt down if power fails.  This technology has been around for years.  Why was it not developed long ago?  Politics, methinks."

"I'm a retired nuclear engineer and have worked on nuclear fuel and safety aspects. In those early years in the 1980s, Thorium was not utilized in NPPs. But its potential was always recognized, and India's 3-stage strategy included Thorium utilization in stage-3. Hopefully, good progress has been made in the last 40 years and would not be surprised if Thorium bundles are loaded in the operating heavy water reactors."

"...Thorium reactor, which is usually called Thorium battery, has already been used for decades in both US and USSR satellites to power satellites. It's not unknown. It's in fact well-known in aerospace field, but the knowledge of it has been closed for public by big energy engineering companies."

"A good talk but he has a number of small errors. The two biggest are: --- Current nuclear reactors burn only 0.5 % of the U235, not a couple percent as he says. --- Thorium is about as common as Lead. We have enough Thorium on the planet Earth to power everyone for 100,000's of years. You can take ordinary dirt, and the trace amounts of Thorium are equal to 12 barrels of oil. Energy wise, we can burn the Thorium in ordinary dirt, and make an energy profit."

"The reason we don't use Thorium for energy is because it can't be used for weapons and isn't rare enough to monopolize the market so it can be controlled by governments. It's cheap energy which means no one makes money which means those making money on energy right now which includes renewable energy are not going to support this energy source."

"Recycling the nuclear waste is a must and very doable, France is currently doing just that. Nuclear waste holds 90% of energy still even after 5 years of use. Especially with electric cars becoming very popular it will put a huge strain on our current energy grid so nuclear plants will be a necessity sooner than later."

I know the consensus here is probably opposed to ANY nuclear power, but renewables have bigger problems.  France gets 71% of its' power from nuclear.  Finland is spending billions of US dollars on a new nuclear reactor.

 

 

 

Edited May 21, 2022 by Airbrush

[TheVat]

I have expressed optimism about thorium reactors elsewhere on the web.  Glad you posted this.  It would be wonderful to move away from uranium in reactors.  I hope we can add more to this thread as countries explore this option and make progress towards a much safer nuclear power.  The huge reduction in waste (with shorter-lived radionuclides) should be reason enough to go this direction.

[MigL]

Other than countries like Germany, that consider nuclear power bad and fossil fuels good ( green anyway ), I think we've only had Chernobyl as a major incident. Three Mile Island and Fukushima both reacted the way they were supposed to.

I would like to see proceeds from carbon/gasoline taxes, and subsidies given to big oil used for research into Fusion reactors, and not go into general coffers to be used for politicians' pet projects/re-election bribes, as Fusion is the ultimate, and safest, goal.

[OldChemE]

Thorium can also be used in a breeder reactor context-- as was done at the Shippingport power plant in the eastern US years ago.  The breeding ratio wasn't terribly good as I recall-- but it worked.  However, while some people talk about fear of nuclear, and while some think nuclear power is either dead or close to dead, the reality is that ever since about 1975 roughly 20% of US power generation has been Nuclear-- and still is today.  I spent 40 years in the nuclear industry and certainly a good way to generate electricity safely when done right (as it has been in the US).  However, I do believe it makes sense to pursue newer technology as well (fusion, wind and solar, for example).  Wind and solar, in particular seem to have a faster response time from identifying a need to producing power than can be done in nuclear.  The differences in response time from need to delivery make a mix desirable.

[swansont]

15 hours ago, Airbrush said:

 

"...Thorium reactor, which is usually called Thorium battery, has already been used for decades in both US and USSR satellites to power satellites. It's not unknown. It's in fact well-known in aerospace field, but the knowledge of it has been closed for public by big energy engineering companies."

Link(s) to satellites acknowledging this needed. (since thorium is not fissile)

 

15 hours ago, Airbrush said:

 

"The reason we don't use Thorium for energy is because it can't be used for weapons and isn't rare enough to monopolize the market so it can be controlled by governments. It's cheap energy which means no one makes money which means those making money on energy right now which includes renewable energy are not going to support this energy source."

Conspiracy claims need to be supported.

 

 

15 hours ago, Airbrush said:

Comments to this video:

You have quotation marks around all these. Am I to understand you are just collecting random comments from some thread? With absolutely no attribution or suggestion of credibility?

 

10 hours ago, MigL said:

Three Mile Island and Fukushima both reacted the way they were supposed to.

Hardly. They reacted to some extent as designed, which showed flaws in their design. But what they were supposed to to was shut down safely, stay cooled, and not release contamination, and they did not “react” this way.

 

One main critique of this is that thorium is not fissile. You can’t make a reactor with thorium as a fuel. You use it to breed U-233, which is. Any suggestion that there would be less waste should be taken with a huge grain of salt. You still have a bunch of intermediate half-life byproducts - too long to let it decay away, short enough that it has significant activity.

The “meltdown-proof” claim is suspect. You still have to remove decay heat. There were issues with TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima that were all related to this. 

[MigL]

10 hours ago, swansont said:

Hardly. They reacted to some extent as designed, which showed flaws in their design.

The classification methods for nuclear incidents are based on thenumber of people evacuated, so while TMI was classified as a 5 and Fukushima also initially a 5, because of the earthquake/tsunami contributions more people were evacuated, and it became a 7 like Chernobyl. .
Chernobyl was only a 7 since the Russians were reluctant to release information about the incident, and did not want to suggest the severity by massive evacuations. Of the three Chernobyl released the most radiation/contamination, but I think that was even less than the explosion at the Mayak facility in 1957, where only 10000 people were evacuated ( it was classified ).

Three Mile Island was shut down and necessitated clean up for a couple of years, and Fukushima had the tsunami to contend with, that shut down its back up power to the cooling pumps, but Chernobyl will be encased in concrete for thousands of years.

[swansont]

21 minutes ago, MigL said:

The classification methods for nuclear incidents are based on thenumber of people evacuated, so while TMI was classified as a 5 and Fukushima also initially a 5, because of the earthquake/tsunami contributions more people were evacuated, and it became a 7 like Chernobyl. .
Chernobyl was only a 7 since the Russians were reluctant to release information about the incident, and did not want to suggest the severity by massive evacuations. Of the three Chernobyl released the most radiation/contamination, but I think that was even less than the explosion at the Mayak facility in 1957, where only 10000 people were evacuated ( it was classified ).

Three Mile Island was shut down and necessitated clean up for a couple of years, and Fukushima had the tsunami to contend with, that shut down its back up power to the cooling pumps, but Chernobyl will be encased in concrete for thousands of years.

That’s probably a regulatory classification because one deals with the public. But having to evacuate is an indication that something went wrong, and not according to plan, because if it did, you wouldn’t have core damage and a release of contaminants 

I imagine the SL-1 incident didn’t require much in the way of evacuation because it was remotely located, but it’s hard to argue it operated the way a reactor is supposed to. It, too, exposed design flaws. But this also shows that there have been more reactor problems than the three that hit the news from 1979 onward.