Bishop Hill Why is Beddington against thorium
Jun 13, 2011 Bureaucrats Energy GWPF have an interesting article about a promising new nuclear power technology - thorium reactors. Perhaps most intriguing is Sir John Beddington's opposition to their development:
...although the Coalition Government continues to pour subsidies worth many millions of pounds into wind power, which, as Live revealed earlier this year, produces at best intermittent energy with potential environmental costs, it has so far decided to do nothing about thorium except to maintain a ‘watching brief’.
The reason is that a review last year by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, concluded that thorium research shouldn’t be a priority, as ‘development of the appropriate technology would appear to be some way into the future’.
That could be described as a depressingly circular argument: if the scientists aren’t funded to pursue the research and development, the technology will indeed remain in the future. Meanwhile, the reasons for Sir John’s pessimistic assessment seem baffling.
In a letter to Cywinski, he admitted the science behind thorium reactors was ‘well based’, and said the main reason he couldn’t recommend government support was because there had never been research on how to reprocess thorium fuel ‘on an industrial scale’.
But this, says Cywinski, totally missed the point: not only would thorium plants produce far less waste, but their fuel – which would only need to be refreshed every ten years, as opposed to 18 months in a conventional nuclear reactor – wouldn’t need to be reprocessed at all.
You do rather get the impression that Sir John has picked the government's winner for them - wind "power".
Reader Comments (73)
KevinUK
Your comment has the ring of truth. Unfortunately.
Don Pablo, there is no need of polywater cooling, as Rossi has included an ice-9 sleeve around the device.
"polywater"
Now we're off into La La Land. Polywater, unless you just means water contaminated with silicon etc, doesn't exist.
Beddington is 200% compromised. It's a sad fact in the UK today that in the main, I can "predict" my views by what significant pubilc figures say. It's made easier by the fact that MOST pubilc figures say nothing of any consequence.
I first noticed it in the Archbishop of Canterbury. But it is the same with Beddington. I disagree with everything he says. I think that Nuclear is important. I think that wind power is a farce. I think his subverting of the Oxburgh panel is "interesting" (chosen because I don't want to be banned for borderline libel). The one exception is Cameron, who makes "cast-iron" statements that I whole-heartedly agree with, and then does the opposite.
Beddington was a Nu-Labour placeman. The fact that the coalition have retained him says a lot about the Coalition IMO.
Tim Worstall
Re 'polywater' - it was a joke started upthread by Don Pablo.
I'm guessing he had something like this in mind.
The real problem with the Thorium cycle is lack of U233.
The Thorium cycle is in fact a U233 reactor co-mixed with Thorium to produce more U233 in a breeder cycle.
As there is almost no U233 available this cycle is nearly doomed until more U233 is made available - either as a by-product of other reactors, or as a a product of 'Throium' reactors where there is a very slight excess of U233 produced.
Any commercial Thorium reactor needs a source of neutrons to convert Thorium into U233. This can be done with accellerators using protons and spallation. The power gain in any such system is about 6:1. When you take into account the thermal processes this is very marginal.
So the future is to breed a lot of U233 in existing reactors and use that to 'seed' Thorium reactors. This will take decades at least.
The dismissal of Thorium cycle is valid as of today. In 10-20 years maybe not.
Jerry
U-235 or Pu-239 can be used as drivers for the thorium to U-233 breeder cycle. It does not require U-233 exclusively as the source of neutrons.
Some of the commentators appear to be mistaken about Thorium reactors see this video www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk The technology is old, and fairly well known. There is plenty of Thorium which can be extracted from minerals sand mining. I understand considerable quantities of waste deposits containing high levels of Thorium were shipped from Australia to Japan earlier this year at no cost other than shipping. I understand there is a Japanese private company that is a long way down the road to producing commercial units. China is certainly not the only country doing research, building pilot plants and with plans to have commercial units operating by 2020.
Re: research money - the EU hope to raise some from selling ETS permits to fund a range of projects including for pumping CO2 underground and moving it around in ships -
"As an example, for a CCS project with relevant costs of €200 million (M) and a proposed operator contribution towards the relevant costs of €40M, the public contribution to the relevant costs would be €160M. Of this, €100M would come from NER300 (i.e. 50% of the relevant costs), and €60M would come from another source (e.g. investment aid from the Member State). If, in addition, the project receives income from a national support scheme (for instance an existing feed-in tariff) of €30M, this should be taken into account. Then the total cost covered by public funding would be: (200-40) + 30, or €190M. If the project proposed to store 500,000 tonnes of CO2/year for the first 10 years of operation, the performance would be 5 million tonnes. The cost-per-unit performance for this project would be €190M divided by 5 Mt, or €38 per tonne of CO2 stored. If the operator contribution was increased to €80M, the cost-per-unit performance would be reduced to €30 per tonne of CO2 stored, and the project’s chance of being ranked higher would improve accordingly."
from:
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/10/549&format=HTML&aged=0&language
More info here:
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/funding/ner300/index_en.htm
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/funding/ner300/docs/faq_13_en.pdf
http://www.ner300.com/
KevinUK - thanks for the first hand post. I'm along way from the coal face (ho ho) but I have formed a similar impression. One thing I have seen reference to elsewhere, is a large part of the costs of nuclear are imposed by the regulatory frame work surrounding it. Do you have any views or comments on this? How much has regulation evolved in light of operational experience? Also has our ability to deliver the actual infrastructure improved - I have seen reference to lack of specialist forging capacity but surely this ought to be a relatively short leadtime capacity to provide? Thanks in advance for any comments.
Not Banned Yet here is a chapter from Professor Dohen on the regualtory ratcheting of nuclear detailing how costs went up manufold, after inflation between the 70s and 80s http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html There is one plant that went from about $100 million to $6 billion and was then knocked down without being allowed to open.
I doubt if the ratcheting has reversed since then ;-)
I think that if we had a level regulatory playing field and if politics allowed the mass production of nuclear plants the cost of producing electricity would be no more than 1/10th of what we do now. Possibly well under 1/10th but that seems a good starting point.
Tim Worstall
Polywater was always in la-la land, along with cold fusion. BBD had my tongue in cheek remark right.
You are quite correct that "polywater" turned out to be an interesting mix of water and silicon, but at one time there were people absolutely convinced that it would turn all the world's water into jello or some such.
Sounds sorta like "We are going to melt the world if we don't stop emitting CO2" doesn't it?
If Rossi has a magical energy convertor, let him show it publicly.
Thanks Neil - will digest later.
Also re: Thorium and policy - this just crossed my radar:
http://www.cer.org.uk/pdf/pb_thorium_june11.pdf
From:
http://www.cer.org.uk/about_new/about_index.html
Not read it yet - sounds interesting.
Author profile of above briefing here, plus some other publications:
http://www.cer.org.uk/about_new/about_cerpersonnel_tindale_10.html
Need more power? Buy my soon to be patented polywater and red mercury reactor. Energy companies have been trying to prevent this for years, but with only a few million I can build a prototype. As for Rossi's gadget, I remain unconvinced until people have seen inside it.
As for Beddington, it's a shame he and DECC don't spend a fraction of the money they've been spending promoting the carbon trading and wind industries on educating people about why fears of nuclear power production are often unfounded.
not yet banned
"KevinUK - thanks for the first hand post. I'm along way from the coal face (ho ho) but I have formed a similar impression. One thing I have seen reference to elsewhere, is a large part of the costs of nuclear are imposed by the regulatory frame work surrounding it. Do you have any views or comments on this? How much has regulation evolved in light of operational experience? Also has our ability to deliver the actual infrastructure improved - I have seen reference to lack of specialist forging capacity but surely this ought to be a relatively short leadtime capacity to provide? Thanks in advance for any comments."
When I was a graduate trainee with National Nuclear Corporation (NNC) I gave a presentation on the history of the nuclear power industry in the UK and have continued to study the subject ever since. Hopefully I am therefore qualified to answer some of you questions, at least in part anyway.
In the UK all nuclear sites have to apply for and obtain a nuclear site licence from the UK nucler regulator which is called the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII). UK nuclear inspectors are amongst the highest paid nuclear workers in the UK nuclear industry largely due to the fact that many year sago they secured an agreement in which the pay of even the lowest ranked inspector was linked to the salery range of senior managers at nuclear sites. I know quite a few UK nuclear inspectors, coming as I do from Merseyside where the UK HSE's NII head office is based. Why am I telling you this? Well if you earn a lot of money then you have to justify it don't you so IMO, nuclear regulators have to justify there continued existence. On way of doing that is to ratchet up the regulatory requirements by introducing ever more stringent nuclear site licencing requirements. In addition many nuclear regulators/inspectors move on to even higher paid jobs with Euratom and the IAEA. Again I'll re-iterate my point - we all have to justify our inflated salaries don't we?
To answer you question about 'infrastructure. prior to the 'dash for gas' under the Thatcher govrenment we had intended to build 10 new nuclear power plants based on the Westinghouse design. In the end we built ONE, namely Sizewell 'B' which underwent the mother of all public inquiries from 1982 to 1985 (which involved 16 million words of evidence) and IMO didn't did do much else but help to further enrich the chairman of the inquiry (Sir Frank Layfield) all the lawyers that were involved in the inquiry. I often wonder what might have transpired if instead the 'dash for gas' in which we built a lot of gas-fired power plants, we had continued on with Maggie's original plan and built the other NINE.
Why did this not happen? Why did we have the 'dash for gas' instead? Well the answee id primarily because of the powers that be within the City persuaded Maggie that far more money was to be made by privatising the UK electricity supply industry (ESI). IMO the ratching up of nuclear regulation and the failure to do deal with the 'nuclear waste arisings' and nuclear facility 'legacies' (largely old nuclear research, power generation and fuel reprocessing plants) left over from our obsession with having our own so called 'independent nuclear deterrent', has resulted in a complete lack 'infrastructure' to support the building of any new nuclear power generation plants within the UK. There's no doubt we could 'tool up' again if needed, but its far more likely that, as with the UK wind farms, most of the main 'kit' (reactor pressure vessels, steam generating units etc) for our next generation of UK nuclear power plants will be imported - most likely from France and Germany given that most of the UK's ESI is now owned by EDF, RWE and E.ON. So much for all those new UK 'green' jobs that we've been promised then? Somehow I doubt it.
Thanks Kevin - follow up appreciated; more good stuff!
BBD
"Jerry
U-235 or Pu-239 can be used as drivers for the thorium to U-233 breeder cycle. It does not require U-233 exclusively as the source of neutrons."
You are obviously well informed.
When i read the whole EMMA article I thought it smacked of 'how do we get/justify our next batch of funding?'. Given that Beddington probably has to suffer regular presentations from far too many of these grant seeking 'look how cool our technology is' academics, then perhaps we shouldn't blame him for having the opinion he does on thorium's potential?
A good few years ago now (five at least), I had some very interesting late night (in the UK) chats with Steve Mc on ClimateAudit about the UK nuclear industry. One of the topics we discussed was the thorium fuel cycle and at the time Steve was unaware that we would need 'breeder' reactors if we were to ever even comtemplate a programme of building nuclear power plants based on the thorium fuel cycle. He asked a lot of fundamental and so difficult to answer questions about nuclear power and I was happy to attempt to answer them, given what Steve Mc had taught me about statistics and temperature re-constructions. It's rare that I ever genuinely ROTFLMAO but when he produced a series of posts on the 'bucket adjustments' I just couldn't help myself. After that I christened him 'Toto' thanks to all his valiant efforts at 'pulling back the curtain'.
There is one other form of power that hasn't been mentioned here - polywell fusion developed by Dr Robert Bussard, who incidentally was involved in ITER and earlier developed ramjet engines. I've read pretty much everything I can find about it and it is really really interesting. The one stumbling block is thermalIzation....just look into it yourselves, especially the manner in which the research was funded. Very interesting indeed.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/emc2-bussard-fusion-status-from-end-of.html
Or just google it.......
Kevin UK
Really informative comments above. Thanks.
I particularly liked the potted history of where it all went wrong during the Thatcher years.
God what a mess it all is.
As I understand Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), a source of neutrons such as plutonium is only needed to initiate the procession of thorium to protactinium to U233. "Thorium is not fissile and consists of a single natural isotope (232) but thorium can be converted to a fissile fuel by the absorption of a neutron followed by a short period of beta decay. After absorbing a neutron, thorium-232 is transmuted into thorium-233, which then beta-decays with a half-life of 22 minutes into protactinium-233, which is chemically distinct from the parent thorium. Protactinium-233 has a half-life of about 27 days, after which is beta-decays to uranium-233, which is fissile and has impressive properties. Uranium-233 produces enough neutrons from fission by a thermal neutron to sustain the continued conversion of thorium to energy, even accounting for normal losses, provided that the reactor is neutronically efficient."
http://energyfromthorium.com/essay3rs/
I hope this helps clear up misinformation in these comments.
@agnostic
Polywell fusion is many orders of magnitude lower than required for generating useful amounts of heat or neutrons - depending if you want simply heat - or neutrons to generate heat in an amplifier cycle.
The present viable thorimum technology is proton accellerator / spallation neutron generation which produces a 6:1 output v input energy ratio. Unless this is at many megawatt levels it's uneconomic.
More promising but untested as yet is fusor generated neutrons with neutron amplifiers. If fully exploited the energy in v energy out may well be economic.
Actually polywell fusion in the incarnation being tested at the moment does not produce heat to the run turbines, it produces electricity directly. In fact the main problem is with thermalization. If the unit gets too hot the process breaks down. The current solution of pulsing the proton guns might work buoy doesn't sound terribly elegant or efficient.
A polywell fusion generator cannot be made too large because current materials will not withstand the exponentially larger energy produced by the design. The optimimum size has been computed as 3 m3 exactly. That's about the size of a large jet engine and interestingly produces similar amounts of power. A jet engine produces around 95 kw and the polywell design produces around 115 kw at that size. That's enough to power a small town.
The polywell design is intended to use boron nuclei as fuel which produces entirely neutron free fusion reactions. A prototype is already underway - WB9. WB8 which is larger scale reproduction of the successful WB7 (WB stands for wiffle ball which is the concept behind the technology) and is presumed to have been successful since WB9 is under way.
I strongly recommend looking into this....Dr Bussard unfortunately has passed away but not before giving a very interesting lecture to Google, a transcript of which can be found on the web....I'll dig it up and post it myself eventually. Especially intriguing is the manner in which it was funded by the US navy, who would not allow in publications of the results, not because of secrecy in the cold war sense as you might imagine, but because there of the political implications of the Dept of Energy having the mandate to do fusion, and their unsuccessful attempts with the tokomak design.
What's interesting about this technology is that it actually uses arcane physics....stuff you would have learnt in high school, and e fusion process itself has been around a long time....in fact one of the developers of television invented it...it's based on the farnsworth reactor. The clever bit is how they have designed containment for it.