{"id":1046,"date":"2010-01-07T05:02:13","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T10:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=1046"},"modified":"2010-01-07T05:04:28","modified_gmt":"2010-01-07T10:04:28","slug":"thorium-wired-magazine-muddies-the-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/01\/07\/worldview\/thorium-wired-magazine-muddies-the-water\/","title":{"rendered":"Thorium: Wired Magazine Muddies the Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit<\/a> recently linked to an article<\/a> by Richard Martin\u00a0in Wired Magazine entitled, ‘Uranium is so Last Century:\u00a0 Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke.”\u00a0 I cringed when I read it.\u00a0 I suspect serious advocates of thorium did as well.\u00a0 It was a piece of scientific wowserism of a sort that has been the bane of nuclear power in the past, and that its advocates would do well to steer clear of in the future.\u00a0 It evoked a romantic world of thorium “revolutionaries” doing battle with the dinosaurs of conventional\u00a0nuclear power.\u00a0 Things aren’t\u00a0quite that black and white in the real world.\u00a0\u00a0Thorium breeders\u00a0deserve fair consideration, not hype, as does nuclear power in general.\u00a0 There are many good reasons to prefer\u00a0it to its alternatives as a source of energy.\u00a0 It doesn’t take a genius to understand those reasons, assuming one approaches the subject with a mind that isn’t made up in advance, and is willing to devote a reasonable amount of time to acquire a basic understanding of the technology.\u00a0\u00a0Martin would be well advised to do so before writing his next article on the subject.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the first place, thorium is not a replacement for uranium, as implied by the title of the Wired article.\u00a0 Rather, the point of putting it in nuclear reactors is to breed uranium, which remains the actual fuel material, albeit in the form of isotope U233 rather than U235.\u00a0 Thus, when Martin writes things like,<\/p>\n

Those technologies are still based on uranium, however, and will be beset by the same problems that have dogged the nuclear industry since the 1960s. It is only thorium… that can move the country toward a new era of safe, clean, affordable energy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

in comparing thorium reactors to their more conventional alternatives, it is evident he doesn’t know what he is talking about.\u00a0 Referring to the physicist Alvin Weinberg, he tells us,<\/p>\n

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the \u201950s through the early \u201970s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the \u201960s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors \u2014 in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With all due respect to Weinberg, a brilliant scientist whose work remains as relevant to conventional reactors as to their\u00a0thorium cousins, this picture of thorium knights in shining armor doing battle with the dark forces of the nuclear weapons establishment is certainly romantic, but it leaves out some rather salient facts.\u00a0 In the first place, conventional power reactors do not even\u00a0produce weapons grade plutonium, which contains a high concentration of plutonium 239.\u00a0 Special reactors that run for a much shorter period of time are used for that purpose.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Furthermore, thorium is not a nuclear fuel.\u00a0 A reactor using thorium alone would never work because thorium is not a fissile material.\u00a0 In other words, unlike, for example, uranium 235 or plutonium 239, it cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction.\u00a0 The point of putting it in nuclear reactors is to breed uranium 233, another isotope that is fissile.\u00a0 We\u00a0began producing nuclear power\u00a0with conventional nuclear reactors based on uranium 235\u00a0rather than thorium breeders\u00a0because of their simplicity, not because of their usefulness as sources of bomb material.\u00a0 The\u00a0fuel needed to run them\u00a0is available in nature as one of the isotopes in mined uranium, and doesn’t depend on a complex breeding cycle for its production.\u00a0 There are other drawbacks to thorium breeders that Martin doesn’t mention in his article.\u00a0 For example, in addition to uranium 233, they produce significant quantities of\u00a0uranium 232, a short lived isotope with some nasty, highly radioactive daughters.\u00a0 Separating it from U233 was out of the question, and its presence\u00a0makes the\u00a0production and handling of\u00a0nuclear fuel elements a great deal more difficult.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’m certainly no opponent of thorium breeders.\u00a0 In fact, I think we should be aggressively developing the technology.\u00a0 However, before writing articles about the subject, it can’t hurt to have some idea what you’re talking about.\u00a0 There are no lack of good articles about the subject on the Web within easy reach of anyone who can use Google.<\/p>\n

\"thorium\"<\/p>\n

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Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit recently linked to an article by Richard Martin\u00a0in Wired Magazine entitled, ‘Uranium is so Last Century:\u00a0 Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke.”\u00a0 I cringed when I read it.\u00a0 I suspect serious advocates of thorium did as well.\u00a0 It was a piece of scientific wowserism of a sort that has been the … Continue reading “Thorium: Wired Magazine Muddies the Water”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[37,43,52,23,11,12,10,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-environment","category-global-warming","category-nuclear-energy","category-nuclear-proliferation","category-nuclear-terrorism","category-nuclear-weapons","category-worldview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-gS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1051,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions\/1051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}