Fusion… Fission… Tomayto… Tomahto…

Posted on 2 February 2010, 0:01, by CWE, under Environment, Military-Industrial Complex, Science & Technology.

BBC News reports, “A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show.”

Wired reports, “[T]horium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems.”

According to the Wired article, among the advantages of thorium over uranium are:

  • It yields very little waste, which must be stored for a few hundred years, rather than a few hundred thousand.
  • It is abundant, thus inexpensive and virtually inexhaustible.
  • It creates enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely.
  • It would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used to make nuclear weapons.

So, if this stuff is so great, then why don’t we see thorium-fueled nuclear power plants dotting the countryside?

Reread that last point above.

Thorium is useless as a weapon.

Nuclear energy was developed at the height of the Cold War, and members of the political/military elite wanted to be able to blow stuff up by the city-load. They pushed for uranium-fueled nuclear power, so that the military could lay its hands on the waste for weapons.

Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning, and we could start hearing more about thorium in the coming years.

Invest accordingly.

CWE

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3 Comments

  1. Randall Randall says:
    2 February 2010 at 19:54

    “The US had one U-233 weapons test. It was, for all intents and purposes, a dud. It was never repeated and we know no details about the lengths they had to go to to keep U-232 contamination down in the U-233 they used. U-232 would infest all aspects of the uranium in a LFTR, and it can’t be separated. It broadcasts its presence like a fire alarm. It tells detectors hundreds of feet away it’s coming. ”

    Well, now. I’m not sure I’d refer to 22KT as a “dud”… Hiroshima was well under that.

    http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Teapot.html :
    “LASL weapon designers however decided to conduct a weapon design experiment with this shot, and unbeknownst to the test effect personnel substituted the untried U-233 core.”

    Now, I’m sure it’s not too hard to come up with a scenario where this thing is very gamma bright and they still manage to get it built and substitute it for a comparatively dim device without any of the sensor technicians noticing, but it does make one wonder.

    Reply to this comment
    • CWE says:
      3 February 2010 at 10:34

      A worldwide moratorium on uranium could be politically tenable, especially give the detectability that Randall describes.

      Conversion to thorium could, for example, test whether Iranian developers are interested in weapons or cheap electricity; and whether Western agents are trying to stop nuclear weapons proliferation or to starve Iran.

      Reply to this comment
      • Randall Randall says:
        5 February 2010 at 18:03

        Actually, U-235 is not nearly as detectable the U-232 impurity makes U-233, and U-238 (otherwise known as depleted uranium, because it’s the byproduct of concentrating U-235 from natural uranium) is used for other applications where high density is important, like ammunition. I don’t think a ban on uranium is very workable, and if you already have a few thorium reactors, putting U-238 in close proximity to the reactor core will produce Pu-239 (and Pu-240, which is an impurity in this context). Pu-239 is especially nice for bombs, because you need quite a lot less of it than Uranium for similar yields. The Pu-240 impurity means that simple bomb designs don’t work, though; implosion-type gadgets are necessary.

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