So, Thorium – what's the downside?

Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century

It gives you, bizzarely, ‘0 posts’, despite having posted, thereby creating an infinite paradox, whereby the whole of STW implodes.

…but then, I’ve just ruined that.

Brilliant,the new age of steam.
Imagine parking that at Tescos 🙂

It’s an interesting fuel, has been around since the late 50’s and from my recollection they tried to create a reactor in the 60’s using it but it wasn’t successful. It certainly seems to be more of a distraction rather than being realistically pursued as an alternative to Uranium production. I think the chinese are the only ones who are looking at this commercially, purely due to the shear cost of generating the next generation reactor and the expectation that once this would be complete, the efficiency improvements in Uranium reactor technology would trump it.

In this application i don’t know, having a steam turbine in a car just doesn’t sound progressive, no matter which way you spin it.

Imagine parking that at Tescos

Someone would bash it with a trolley.

Plus, where’s the boot? Totally impractical.

If you do run out of fuel, will you get chased around by Libyans after a trip to the Esso station?

If you do run out of fuel, will you get chased around by Libyans after a trip to the Esso station?

It certainly has a ‘Back to the future’ ring to it – not least because that car could have been designed by Syd Mead in the 1960s so its quite a backward looking vision of the future. Although if the future does turn out to look like Mead’s drawings I for one will be very happy about that

India is a big thorium developer, maybe due to the large deposits available to exploit.
Bill Gates put some money up for nuclear reactor development? TerraWatt, but new designs, travelling waves and depleted uranium instead. Similar 50-100 year burn time of the fuel[/url]. Not sure the size is convenient yet.

what’s the downside?

You’re talking about driving around with;

1) radioactive fuel,
2) a continuous nuclear reaction,
3) high pressure/high temperature steam,
4) and a high speed turbine.

Sounds fine to me! 🙄

Those are all major safety hazards that modern technology couldn’t mitigate sufficiently to build it all into a moving vehicle.

my tungstens have thorium in them goes off to empty dust collector onto floor

http://www.euronews.com/2013/10/28/fire-from-water/

this was more interesting but dunno what the scalability (chances of oil related economy destabalization) for the automobile would be

The act of emptying the dust collector onto the floor is the theoretically more risky one…

The only downside compared to uranium fission is that you can’t make nuclear weapons from thorium or its fission products which probably explains why it was not developed in the 50s.

Liquid thorium reactors can be made inherently safe i.e. no possibility of meltdown and the fission products are much shorter lived than from uranium fission

The Chinese and Indians are taking it pretty seriously but as usual the British Government is investing a pittance.

We can only hope the Chinese and Indians are successful becuase if they aren’t then down the road there’s going to be some severe competition with them for the world’s remaining fossil fuels

Wikipedia

Oakridge was a successful research reactor about 50 years ago. But it would require 20 years to commercialise as there are some specific technologies that need development to overcome the peculiarities of chemically processing liquid Thorium salts, none of which seem really blocking.

So given that, and the obvious safety and utility of a liquid fuel, and the abundance of Thorium, why did we not have commercial MSRs by 1975? Because MSRs don’t make Plutonium, which everyone needed for bombs. Now we have very significant “resources” of difficult to handle Plutonium as a by-product of Uranium reactors and 20 years developing Plutonium-Uranium MOX technology at Thorpe have not technically and commercially succeeded in converting it to re-usable supply of fuel. Annoying.

India is making a solid MOX fuel with Thorium for conventional solid fuel reactors which in theory isn’t a bad idea although with any MOX fuel, it alters the reactor behaviour which needs care to work out.

You’re talking about driving around with;

1) radioactive fuel,
2) a continuous nuclear reaction,
3) high pressure/high temperature steam,
4) and a high speed turbine.

Sounds fine to me!

Those are all major safety hazards that modern technology couldn’t mitigate sufficiently to build it all into a moving vehicle.

As opposed to
1) 20-50L of highly combustible, increasingly scarce, hazardous to produce and expensive to distribute fuel
2) continuous controlled explosions
3) high temperature, highly polluting exhaust gasses

That sounds so much easier to justify…

That sounds so much easier to justify…

It’s the tobacco / alcohol debate – if they were new products, they’d never be sold..

can you hear the roar of my 4.2 thorium reactor….oh you cant ..gutted

maybe if i put one of those loud exhausts on it

Pretty sure that if we invested £50,000,000 into alternative reactor technology instead of the white elephant that is HS2 we’d get some useful results.

so, it’s inherently safer, has shorter lived waster products, breeds more of its own fuel, the reactors are more efficient than uranium, there’s more fuel on earth, etc blah blah

not very forward thinking of western nations to ignore this particular route, was it?

@ flaperon

shouldn’t we ask for more?

50 million pounds isn’t really very much money in today’s world.

The other barrier to MSRs the promise of inexhaustible energy from Fusion reactors. So far, research fusion reactors are far further behind the technology readiness level than MSRs.

It may be that we eventually get commercially viable fission energy, but I just wish we spread the risk and globally invested in developing commercially viable Thorium MSR technology with an “open-source” model, as a stop-gap for humanity, or a permanent alternative to solid fuel reactors if necessary.

[/quote]The Chinese and Indians are taking it pretty seriously but as usual the British Government is investing a pittance.

2 issues with this:

1) India has seen Thorium as the answer to the problems since 1954 and not really got anywhere.

2) The UK is helping Norway and India with Thorium research, see BBC link

It’s easy to slag off the amount the UK put into R&D, but we do okay. Although I’d accept a Billion nicked from somewhere else to do more would be helpful.

@mrmonkfinger – apologies, looks like a zero vanished into the ether somewhere. Should have just written “billion”. 😉

In this application i don’t know, having a steam turbine in a car just doesn’t sound progressive, no matter which way you spin it.

It’s only regressive if you spin it backwards…