Power from thorium?

[begreen]

This is an interesting talk about metal source reactors. It's a bit over an hour long lecture and gets a bit technical. He starts talking about energy costs around 18:00. I'm intrigued by large networks of smaller distributed power sources. Any nuclear physicists here?

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"Dr. Robert Hargraves spoke at Google's office in Cambridge MA on May 21, 2014. His talk addressed world economic development, environmental sustainability, and energy production. The energy technology which may have the greatest potential and merits much more investment in the USA is Metal Salt Reactors, especially Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. This technology has zero carbon footprint, very small environmental footprint overall, and is exceptionally safe and reliable. The USA was involved in it as recently at the 1970's, but our military industrial complex pushed MSR out of the picture because it is virtually unweaponizable. China is quietly pouring $100 million per year into it."

 

[woodgeek]

IIRC, the thorium reactors have a lot of very nice attributes compared to the existing fleet, but require fuel reprocessing (i.e. breeding). I am in the camp that new nuclear, without some mass production of standard designs (maybe), is not going to give cost effective power.

With the PV revolution coming down the pipe (the penny dropped for a lot of utilities in the last year), I think it just got a lot harder to find investors for new nukes than it was before. Nothing in the conceptual thorium designs I have seen makes it look like it will be cheaper, and a few things make it look more expensive (reprocessing).

We'd have to do a few prototype reactors and run them awhile before we could decide to fund/build a fleet of them. Who will pay the upfront on building a half dozen test reactors, when no-one will build existing designs of LWR for profit?

I'd lump it in with fusion and solar power satellites.

 

[velvetfoot]

Been tried:

"Dr Sheldon Cooper (aka Shelly to his mum!) was born and raised in East Texas, started college at the age of 11 and achieved his first PHD at the age of 16. Sheldon became a theoretical physicist at Caltech where he advertised for a room mate and met his best friend & colleague Leonard Hofstadter. As a child Sheldon attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his shed to power his neighbours electricity…"
http://big-bang-theory.net/sheldon-cooper/

 

[Jags]

Chances are that if it weren't for militarization use, thorium would have won over Uranium for power generation.

 

[FTG-05]

Kirk Sorensen's youtube "LFTRs in 5 minutes" video:

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ore here: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kirk+sorensen+lftr

 

[FTG-05]

Chances are that if it weren't for militarization use, thorium would have won over Uranium for power generation.

This is exactly right. One director of Oak Ridge NL lost his job (and pretty much destroyed his career) promoting LFTR technology since it does not support nuclear weapons grade fuel