"So why does everyone who knows nothing about reactors think thorium is the beez kneez, while everyone who knows something about reactors laughs at them?" One of the advantages of growing up in a nuclear weapons lab is you end up hanging out with the kids of people who... know stuff about fission. "Because from an energy-in, energy-out standpoint we have no reason to expect that thorium reactors are viable," is the answer I've gotten three times from three different Ph. D nuclear physicists. It's like that time my Chem 141 professor, who was slummin' and bored because he was supposed to be doing inorganic research, decided to spend an hour telling us why all this talk of "silocon-based life" in sci fi was bullshit as a roundabout way to explain electron shells: carbon is so much more amenable to energy transport that silicon-based life would move at about the same pace as crystal-forming and without access to liquid water any silicon-based life would be competing with carbon-based life because there's no reason to ever expect that a stellar environment would create silicon without creating carbon first. They don't tell you this about biodiesel, either: it's less energy-dense than diesel and the energy necessary for creating it is an externality that you don't have to deal with when putting it in your tank but you do have to deal with when arguing for it as an energy solution. It's like hydrogen fuel cells. Yay! You made a car run on hydrogen! Great! Where'd the hydrogen come from? Oh yeah? Oil? And how much energy did it take to crack the hydrogen loose? Really? And how much more energy-efficient would it have been to turn it into super-unleaded? Yeah, I know, theoretically you could have electrolytically cracked it from sea water using wind, solar, unicorn farts and rainbows but you didn't, did you? The pragmatic arguments against thorium reactors usually focus on "we don't build them because you don't get plutonium out of them which we need for nuclear weapons" but you get U-233 which you can totally use in a pinch. This could well be why India is pushing hard into thorium, but it isn't: India is pushing hard into thorium because they have a lot of thorium within their borders. Even then they've been on the verge of making one work for about sixteen years now. The real argument against thorium reactors is that once you account for energy life cycles, the efficiency of production is below breakeven. Nobody really wants to bring this up because once you account for energy life cycles the efficiency of uranium reactors ain't so great either, which is one of the reasons the United States hasn't made any new ones in quite a while. Thus, thorium reactors remain perpetually just beyond the horizon: a promising technology if only we'd sink the billions and billions and billions of dollars that China and India have. Because, see, just because attempts at thorium reactors have failed for the past 40 years (compare with Fermi's pile) doesn't mean they will continue to fail. If we hold our heads right and squint just so, they'll save the world. Yeah let's take an unproven technology with radically-unsafe byproducts that depends on hypothetical metallurgy and scatter it across the countryside as quickly as we can! Why? Because the nerds don't wanna hear anything bad about thorium and if the hippies like solar we better endorse something else so we can differentiate ourselves.“One of my concerns with the Yang climate plan is I think he probably just Googled "advanced nuclear," took a look at the top hits online, and ran with that,” says Kieran Dolan, a nuclear engineering graduate student at MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Lab.
To transition the United States from fossil fuels to green energy, Yang wants the government to invest $50 billion in the development of thorium molten-salt nuclear reactors—and he wants them on the grid by 2027.
Just for clarification, do you mean life cycle analysis by 'energy life cycles'? I thought the main reason we haven't seen a lot of nuclear expansion, other than public pushback, is the rapidly increasing costs with decreasing magnitude of construction; you either need to build a dozen at a time, or none at all. What do you think about nuclear as a stepping stone for a transition to renewables? If France can do it...The real argument against thorium reactors is that once you account for energy life cycles, the efficiency of production is below breakeven.
Looks like I do. Policy is not my native language. In the US, at least, the fact that you can't build a reactor without it being a megaproject means that you never get an accurate cost assessment from the get-go. And, since you're now talking about a megaproject with giant cost-plus contractors and little competitive bidding operating under a dozen different regulatory entities, you're talking about epic graft and corruption. France gets around this through nationalization. Notably, electricity in France is about 30% more expensive than in the United States, which is still the cheapest in Europe. But then, that's what happens when you win The Great Game: you force everyone else to spend more on resources.Just for clarification, do you mean life cycle analysis by 'energy life cycles'?
I thought the main reason we haven't seen a lot of nuclear expansion, other than public pushback, is the rapidly increasing costs with decreasing magnitude of construction; you either need to build a dozen at a time, or none at all.
China says it's putting a few billion into building prototypes. It takes a long time to break dirt on any nuclear project in the U.S. 2027 is a totally unrealistic to time frame to build anything. Everyone else can build nuclear faster than us. Timeline to build a nuclear reactor here is minimum ten years for a pre licensed design (I don't think anyone has done it that quick since the 70's) and waaayyy longer for an unlicensed design (35 years?) You have two nuclear reactors sitting and gathering dust in Washington. They were supposed to build five. Only one ever powered up. It's a good example of the nuclear project life cycle in the U.S. Cost and time over runs, a fearful public and the economics of the thing not working out will kill or delay any project to the point that domestic innovative nuclear power is dead here. If there is any chance of thorium being viable, we won't be the ones to prove it. A thorium reactor might be built with Bill Gates money or something but it'll happen in Indonesia, China or India. I'll even go far as to say America will never lead in any nuclear power construction project again because the regulatory, environmental and local governance issues in front of it, unless that nuclear power project is on a Navy ship. I guess your argument is that it's not viable and no one is as dumb as us so we are the only dummies that would do such a thing. There are some smart people who think it might be viable and politicians aren't too carful with public monies. It's not beyond reckoning that someone will put the financing behind a project but I'd be fucking shocked if the U.S. was able to break dirt faster than a decade without the whole thing becoming a regulatory, political or environmental debacle. P.S. Washington does have a working reactor beyond the 5 I was talking about and I've heard that it chugs along just fine. I had a professor who was an energy economist that sat on the board that recommend mothballing the five reactors they gave up on, shit was a fiasco.
I've driven past Satsop plenty of times. Will be driving past it tomorrow, in fact. Here's the thing, though: uranium nuclear is scary enough. there's plenty that can go wrong. And if you have other choices, you're going to use them. Know who's pushing hard into thorium? India. 'cuz they have 25% of the world's capacity. Know who isn't? The United States. Because while we also have 25% of the thorium in the world, we've also got about that much of the uranium. My argument is that nuclear scientists aren't idiots and the people who aren't doing anything with thorium reactors? Are nuclear scientists. China's investment in thorium reactors, to date, is billions of yuan - they're at about $300m. OBOR is budgeted between $4 and $8 trillion so it's not like they won't spend when they want to.I guess your argument is that it's not viable and no one is as dumb as us so we are the only dummies that would do such a thing.