Sand
Footballguy
Looks like the Japanese are looking to thorium for their future reactors. Love it. If this catches on the energy landscape of the world could see a sea change.
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Thorium (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Sand
- Start date
Drunken Cowboy
Footballguy
I just saw this as a result of the bump. Prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is based on religion and the government shouldn't do this, but at least there is a reason. There is no, let me repeat no, reason to make hemp illegal. Making pot illegal is stupid, but I can come up with reasons, albeit bad ones. Again, there are no reasons why hemp should be illegal. To reiterate:Making hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing our government has ever done.As long as pot is illegal, hemp will be illegal. Now pot being illegal may be stupid, but prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is stupider.Hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing about our government. It is also so emblematic of many of our other problems.Actually there is very little we use oil for that a bio replacement isn't available for. Hemp can be used to produce plastics for example.Thoughtful post. Made me think that the other stuff we make out of petroleum is a more important reason for conserving the supply than is fuel for transportation. If we find alternative energy, electric car/roadway technology is advancing rapidly enough that we'll be able to make the transition efficiently. But we need oil for all that other stuff.But Charlie, we'll live to see it.I would be curious to see what the ratio is for (non gas)petroleum products vs gas produced. We make an awful lot of other stuff besides gasoline out of oil. The impact may not be as bad as we would think. Sure some jobs would disappear but I would think that they would be replaced by new jobs created from the new tech that would come about as a result of the changes from switching to thorium.
I think it will happen just not in our lifetimes.
bueno
In a class by himself
Hemp is the same plant as pot. If one is illegal, the other one will be.I just saw this as a result of the bump. Prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is based on religion and the government shouldn't do this, but at least there is a reason. There is no, let me repeat no, reason to make hemp illegal. Making pot illegal is stupid, but I can come up with reasons, albeit bad ones. Again, there are no reasons why hemp should be illegal. To reiterate:Making hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing our government has ever done.As long as pot is illegal, hemp will be illegal. Now pot being illegal may be stupid, but prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is stupider.Hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing about our government. It is also so emblematic of many of our other problems.Actually there is very little we use oil for that a bio replacement isn't available for. Hemp can be used to produce plastics for example.Thoughtful post. Made me think that the other stuff we make out of petroleum is a more important reason for conserving the supply than is fuel for transportation. If we find alternative energy, electric car/roadway technology is advancing rapidly enough that we'll be able to make the transition efficiently. But we need oil for all that other stuff.But Charlie, we'll live to see it.
I think it will happen just not in our lifetimes.
bueno
In a class by himself
I was typing too fast and ,missed a word. Corrected it above.
Good stuff about mining thorium. We traffic in metals like indium, gallium, germanium, rhenium, etc....all by-products. When demand increases, so does the price and it can do so in a hurry. Like you said, there are no indium mines. The other thing is you have to PROCESS and REFINE these elements. This is a labor intensive, highly skilled, big money stakes business. Finding these sorts of elements is not like panning for gold.
Drunken Cowboy
Footballguy
This is not really true in practical terms.Hemp is the same plant as pot. If one is illegal, the other one will be.I just saw this as a result of the bump. Prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is based on religion and the government shouldn't do this, but at least there is a reason. There is no, let me repeat no, reason to make hemp illegal. Making pot illegal is stupid, but I can come up with reasons, albeit bad ones. Again, there are no reasons why hemp should be illegal. To reiterate:Making hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing our government has ever done.As long as pot is illegal, hemp will be illegal. Now pot being illegal may be stupid, but prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is stupider.Hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing about our government. It is also so emblematic of many of our other problems.Actually there is very little we use oil for that a bio replacement isn't available for. Hemp can be used to produce plastics for example.Thoughtful post. Made me think that the other stuff we make out of petroleum is a more important reason for conserving the supply than is fuel for transportation. If we find alternative energy, electric car/roadway technology is advancing rapidly enough that we'll be able to make the transition efficiently. But we need oil for all that other stuff.But Charlie, we'll live to see it.
I think it will happen just not in our lifetimes.
bueno
In a class by himself
If you want to say it is the low tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) strain of Cannabis, fine. It is the same plant.This is not really true in practical terms.Hemp is the same plant as pot. If one is illegal, the other one will be.I just saw this as a result of the bump. Prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is based on religion and the government shouldn't do this, but at least there is a reason. There is no, let me repeat no, reason to make hemp illegal. Making pot illegal is stupid, but I can come up with reasons, albeit bad ones. Again, there are no reasons why hemp should be illegal. To reiterate:Making hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing our government has ever done.As long as pot is illegal, hemp will be illegal. Now pot being illegal may be stupid, but prohibiting buying alcohol on Sunday is stupider.Hemp being illegal is the single stupidest thing about our government. It is also so emblematic of many of our other problems.Actually there is very little we use oil for that a bio replacement isn't available for. Hemp can be used to produce plastics for example.Thoughtful post. Made me think that the other stuff we make out of petroleum is a more important reason for conserving the supply than is fuel for transportation. If we find alternative energy, electric car/roadway technology is advancing rapidly enough that we'll be able to make the transition efficiently. But we need oil for all that other stuff.But Charlie, we'll live to see it.
I think it will happen just not in our lifetimes.
bueno
In a class by himself
What part of it is the same plant don't you understand? A field of pot looks like a field of hemp. Can't tell them apart. So how would you know that Farmer Brown isn't growing pot in his hemp field? You can't. This if one is illegal, the other would be.
roadkill1292
Footballguy
Good story.
edit: I went back and re-read this thread, mostly for the entertainment value of gb FavreCo's observations. But I was also left confused by the dichotomy of bueno being so adamant about an insufficient supply and the Chinese (and others) believing otherwise.
The Chinese are in position to make this their very own Manhattan Project. If anything can push thorium over the top as a viable energy source, this is the scenario that does it.
edit: I went back and re-read this thread, mostly for the entertainment value of gb FavreCo's observations. But I was also left confused by the dichotomy of bueno being so adamant about an insufficient supply and the Chinese (and others) believing otherwise.
The Chinese are in position to make this their very own Manhattan Project. If anything can push thorium over the top as a viable energy source, this is the scenario that does it.
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joffer
Footballguy
here's the whole articleChina blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium'joffer said:
The Chinese are running away with thorium energy, sharpening a global race for the prize of clean, cheap, and safe nuclear power. Good luck to them. They may do us all a favour.
Princeling Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, is spearheading a project for China's National Academy of Sciences with a start-up budget of $350m.
He has already recruited 140 PhD scientists, working full-time on thorium power at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics. He will have 750 staff by 2015.
The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium -- originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s -- opting instead for new generation of thorium reactors that produce far less toxic waste and cannot blow their top like Fukushima.
"China is the country to watch," said Baroness Bryony Worthington, head of the All-Parliamentary Group on Thorium Energy, who visited the Shanghai operations recently with a team from Britain's National Nuclear Laboratory.
"They are really going for it, and have talented researchers. This could lead to a massive break-through."
The thorium story is by now well-known. Enthusiasts think it could be the transforming technology needed to drive the industrial revolutions of Asia -- and to avoid an almighty energy crunch as an extra two billion people climb the ladder to western lifestyles.
At the least, it could do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas -- but on a bigger scale, for much longer, perhaps more cheaply, and with near zero CO2 emissions.
The Chinese are leading the charge, but they are not alone. Norway's Thor Energy began a four-year test last month with Japan's Toshiba-Westinghouse to see whether they could use thorium at Norway's conventional Halden reactor in Oslo.
The Japanese are keen to go further, knowing they have to come up with something radically new to regain public trust and save their nuclear industry.
Japan's International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) -- now led by thorium enthusiast Takashi Kamei -- is researching molten salt reactors that use liquid fuel.
Is this what Premier Shinzo Abe meant when he revealed before Christmas that he planned to relaunch nuclear power in Japan with "entirely different" technology? We will find out.
The Chinese aim to beat them to it. Technology for the molten salt process already exists. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee built such a reactor in the 1960s. It was shelved by the Nixon Administration. The Pentagon needed plutonium residue from uranium to build nuclear bombs. The imperatives of the Cold War prevailed.
The thorium blueprints gathered dust in the archives until retrieved and published by former Nasa engineer Kirk Sorensen. The US largely ignored him: China did not.
Mr Jiang visited the Oak Ridge labs and obtained the designs after reading an article in the American Scientist two years ago extolling thorium. His team concluded that a molten salt reactor -- if done the right way -- may answer China's prayers.
Mr Jiang says China's energy shortage is becoming "scary" and will soon pose a threat to national security. It is no secret what he means. Escalating disputes with with India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and above all Japan, are quickly becoming the biggest threat to world peace. It is a resource race compounded by a geo-strategic struggle, with echoes of the 1930s.
His mission is to do something about China's Achilles Heel very fast. The Shanghai team plans to build a tiny 2 MW plant using liquid flouride fuel by the end of the decade, before scaling up to commercially viable size over the 2020s. It is also working on a pebble-back reactor.
He estimates that China has enough thorium to power its electricity needs for "20,000 years". So does the world. The radioactive mineral is scattered across Britain. The Americans have buried tonnes of it, a hazardous by-product of rare earth metal mining.
China is already building 26 conventional reactors by 2015, with a further 51 planned, and 120 in the pipeline, but these have all the known drawbacks, and rely on imported uranium.
The beauty of thorium is that you cannot have a Fukushima disaster. Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University, who anchor's the UK's thorium research network ThorEA, said the metal must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the process. "There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam," he said.
His team is working on an accelerator driven subcritical reactor. "Peope are beginning to realize that uranium isn't sustainable. We're going to have to breed new nuclear fuel. If we are going to the trouble of breeding, we could start to use thorium instead, without introducing plutonium into the cycle," he said.
Thorium has its flaws. The metallurgy is complex. It is "fertile" but not fissile, and has to be converted in Uranium 233. Claims by the International Atomic Energy Institute in 2005 that it has "intrinsic resistance" to proliferation but have since been qualified. It could be used as feedstock for bombs, though not easily.
Yet it leaves far less toxic residue. Most of the mineral is used up in the fission process, while uranium reactors use up just 0.7pc. It can even burn up existing stockpiles of plutonium and hazardous waste.
Cambridge scientists published a tantalising study in the Annals of Nuclear Energy in February showing that it is possible to "achieve near complete transuranic waste incineration" by throwing the old residue into the reactor with thorium.
In other words, it can help clean up the mess left by a half a century of nuclear weapons and uranium reactors, instead of transporting it at great cost to be encased in concrete and buried for milennia. It is why some `greens' such as Baroness Worthington -- a former Friends of the Earth activist -- are embracing thorium. Though there are other reasons.
The thorium molten salt process takes place at atmospheric pressures. It does not require the vast domes of conventional reactors, so costly, and such an eyesore.
You could build pint-size plants largely below ground, less obtrusive than a shopping mall, powering a small town the size of Tunbridge Wells or Colchester. There would be shorter transmission lines, less leakage, and less risk of black-outs. The elegance is irresistible.
Mr Sorensen says his group Flibe Energy is exploring 250 MW reactors that could be tailor-made to power a single steel plant. Imagine the benefits for China, which drives is collosal steel industry -- 40pc of the world's total -- with high-polluting coking coal, much of it shipped from distant mines in lorries.
Mr Sorensen said his molten salt design could not cause a meltdown because it never reaches a high enough temperature to melt the nickel-alloy vessel.
If there is an emergency, a plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. "The reactor saves itself," he said.
Major players in the nuclear industry have had a vested interest in blocking thorium. They have huge sunk costs in the old technology, and they have bent the ear of cash-strapped ministers.
The hesitance of governments is understandable, but the costs are going to hit whatever they do. The overrun fiasco of Areva's Olkilouto reactor in Finland is not pretty either, and the UK's new reactor plans for Hinkley tempt fate as well.
China's dash for thorium is now changing the game. Britain has begun to hedge its bets. Chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington said in September that the benefits of thorium are "often overstated" but conceded "theoretical advantages regarding sustainability, reducing radiotoxicity and reducing proliferation risk".
He noted rising global interest. "It may therefore be judicious for the UK to maintain a low level of engagement in thorium fuel cycle research." A bit lame for a country that once pioneered nuclear physics, but better than nothing.
Xu Hongjie, the director of the Shanghai project, says the US Energy Department has begun to take a close interest in China's plans and is now seeking "collaberation". He is also talking to the Russians. The Indians are kicking their thorium programme into higher gear.
You can view it as a technology race or a joint venture in the common interest. It hardly matters which. If the Chinese can crack thorium, the world will need less oil, coal, and gas than feared. Wind turbines will vanish from our landscape. There will less risk of a global energy crunch, less risk of resource wars, and less risk of a climate tipping point.
Who can object to that?
Brady Marino
Footballguy
If China figures out a way to make gasless cars using Thorium, they will have just hatched the biggest car revolution since the car was made in the first place.
roadkill1292
Footballguy
The original crux of this most interesting thread was a tiny outfit in Connecticut called Laser Power Systems who claimed they were close to completing this technology. Eight ounces of thorium was presumably good for 300,000 miles of power, which now takes about 10,000 gallons of gasoline (or about the cost of the car itself). I haven't seen any progress out of LPS in recent months and it may be an unworkable concept. But if the Chinese can crack the problem of scalability to even a modest level, then the sky is the limit for cheap and plentiful electrical power. And if we have cheap and plentiful electricity, then we can replace oil as power for cars indirectly -- and we won't need miracle battery technology to do it.
Would be cool, but hard to take an article too seriously when it quotes Wikipedia....
http://www.industrytap.com/thorium-fueled-automobile-engine-needs-refueling-once-a-century/15649
There are now over one billion cars traveling roads around the world directly and indirectly costing trillions of dollars in material resources, time and noxious emissions. Imagine all these cars running cleanly for 100 years on just 8 grams of fuel each.
Laser Power Systems (LPS) from Connecticut, USA, is developing a new method of automotive propulsion with one of the most dense materials known in nature: thorium. Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat. The company has been experimenting with small bits of thorium, creating a laser that heats water, produces steam and powers a mini turbine.
Current models of the engine weigh 500 pounds, easily fitting into the engine area of a conventionally-designed vehicle. According to CEO Charles Stevens, just one gram of the substance yields more energy than 7,396 gallons (28,000 L) of gasoline and 8 grams would power the typical car for a century.
The idea of using thorium is not new. In 2009, Loren Kulesus designed the Cadillac World Thorium Fuel Concept Car. LPS is developing the technology so it can be mass-produced.
Wider Implications of Thorium
According to Robert Hargraves, “low or non-CO2 emitting energy sources must be cheaper than coal or will ultimately fail to displace fossil fuels.” The United States uses 20% of the world’s energy today and, according to Hargraves, if it cut its CO2 emissions to zero, 80% produced by other countries would still be a problem. With CO2 emissions climbing seemingly beyond all bounds, pessimism is rampant and bold ideas are needed.
Thorium may also be the answer to the world’s nuclear energy conundrum and Wikipedia provides some of its advantages:
http://www.industrytap.com/thorium-fueled-automobile-engine-needs-refueling-once-a-century/15649
There are now over one billion cars traveling roads around the world directly and indirectly costing trillions of dollars in material resources, time and noxious emissions. Imagine all these cars running cleanly for 100 years on just 8 grams of fuel each.
Laser Power Systems (LPS) from Connecticut, USA, is developing a new method of automotive propulsion with one of the most dense materials known in nature: thorium. Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat. The company has been experimenting with small bits of thorium, creating a laser that heats water, produces steam and powers a mini turbine.
Current models of the engine weigh 500 pounds, easily fitting into the engine area of a conventionally-designed vehicle. According to CEO Charles Stevens, just one gram of the substance yields more energy than 7,396 gallons (28,000 L) of gasoline and 8 grams would power the typical car for a century.
The idea of using thorium is not new. In 2009, Loren Kulesus designed the Cadillac World Thorium Fuel Concept Car. LPS is developing the technology so it can be mass-produced.
Wider Implications of Thorium
According to Robert Hargraves, “low or non-CO2 emitting energy sources must be cheaper than coal or will ultimately fail to displace fossil fuels.” The United States uses 20% of the world’s energy today and, according to Hargraves, if it cut its CO2 emissions to zero, 80% produced by other countries would still be a problem. With CO2 emissions climbing seemingly beyond all bounds, pessimism is rampant and bold ideas are needed.
Thorium may also be the answer to the world’s nuclear energy conundrum and Wikipedia provides some of its advantages:
- Weapons-grade fissionable material (233U) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor; this means, for example, Iran could be asked to develop only a thorium based reactor, virtually eliminating the issue of nuclear weapon development.
- Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste;
- Thorium mining produces a single pure isotope, whereas the mixture of natural uranium isotopes must be enriched to function in most common reactor designs. The same cycle could also use the fissionable U-238 component of the natural uranium, and also contained in the depleted reactor fuel;
- Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming,[29] so fission stops by default in an accelerator driven reactor.
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Sand
Footballguy
As cool as this is I have a hard time seeing this come around. The populace tends to be very leery of anything with the radioactive tag on it. The paranoia over nuclear power supplies on exploration satellites is off the charts (I work on this problem - so I speak from experience here). I can see the rhetoric now - and it ain't good.
NCCommish
Footballguy
I don't know. If they can sell it as a roided up battery that may go. It wouldn't bother me anyway but I definitely see what you are saying.
Lutherman2112
Footballguy
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roadkill1292
Footballguy
1. Glad to see this idea isn't dead yet.
2. I re-read this page and discovered that I've been making fun of FavreCo for a minimum of four years now.
