If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy.
Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physicists, notably Egil Lillestøl at the University of Bergen, have talked to official figures about this for a long time about this without getting any kind of traction.
Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean and cheap next-generation nuclear power. If these researchers manage to develop something without official support, it would be impressive indeed. That the Norwegian government isn't willing to support clean energy research is really quite baffling, given that the energy sector is hands-down the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy. And Norway has the world's second-largest known thorium reserves. For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.
Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium.
Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all?
I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I would much rather have the focus of the energy industry be solar energy right now.
I hope countries in the future are powered 70-80% by solar, and 20-30% by other sources like nuclear energy (at least until we figure out how to store solar energy cheaply for night use), than the other way around. And we can only get there fast if we have the industry's almost complete focus on solar energy, and have them invest billions into researching it and lowering the cost of solar panels.
Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2].
Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby. Utah doesn't really have the spare water capacity to use it as a potential energy store, either.
The point being that, as great as renewables are, without a way to cheaply store vast amounts of renewable energy or a way to shuffle energy from great distances, it isn't going to work on its own. We need a solid baseline, which, of course, is coal today, but I'd much rather keep looking for better nuclear.
There's a lot of energy in those bonds; I have a great deal of confidence we can find a way to leverage it without all of the nasty side-effect. We just need to get past the knee-jerk reaction of "nuclear is bad" and to a better place of "today's nuclear leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't mean tomorrow's will"[3].
3. http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html - You can see that Nuclear is far less deadly than coal, but, when things go wrong, it costs a whole lot more than coal.
Better still, adjust demand to it changes with supply by having electric cars with removable batteries, the batteries being recharged when there is excess power.
> Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby.
Utah is connected to the rest of the USA. Is it ever not sunny and not windy everywhere?
CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.
Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.
CANDU reactors are designed to put less radioactive material back into the earth than came out of it, and when problems occur in a CANDU design it fails safe.
>CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.
There is less uranium in the waste, but there will be fission products and trans-uranium elements just like in the fuel of regular reactors. Radioactivity of uranium is hardly a problem, when dealing with spent fuel. In short term (less than 100 years) fission products produce most of the radioactivity. In long term trans-uranium elements are the problem.
>Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.
Halting a normal fission chain reaction is hardly a source of accidents in any current nuclear reactor design. Decay heat is produced in the spent nuclear fuel of CANDUs just like in Fukushima or Three Mile Island.
CANDU is an interesting reactor design, but there is none as great alternative as you propose. However, various active and passive safety measures may get you very close. I don't know CANDU design so well, that I could judge those.
Interesting, I thought the large heat sink inherent in the CANDU design essentially ensured that with no human interaction that CANDU reactors would failsafe. My understanding was such that the 'reactor' might be destroyed but the design was such that the failure cascade would not release radioactive materials outside of the containment units.
As I said, I don't know the safety systems of CANDU :)
Large heat sink buys you time to get the cooling working again. Ultimately the heat must be transferred out somehow. In modern reactor designs these systems are usually designed to passively for very long times. With CANDU's it is very likely to be the case too.
In nuclear engineering one must always consider also the chance, that not everything is working as designed (like the destroyed diesel generators and external power sources at Fukushima). PRA (Probabilistic Risk Analysis) is used for that. PRA analysis are used for detecting most vulnerable systems in a nuclear power plant and this information is used to design new safer reactor types and to update the old ones little by little to be still safer. Harsh weather, seismic activity etc. is also considered in these analysis, but sadly in Fukushima even detected vulnerabilities didn't lead to improvements in time.
Even, if everything is done as well as possible, there is still a chance (although with modern designs almost arbitrarily small) that under certain conditions all the safety systems will fail. An ultimate example of such an event, would be a 100 km meteorite smashing the plant to atoms.
We agree on older plants being not as safe as new ones. My original sentence was about things you just can't prepare for (with any reasonable means). After that I just wanted to say, that it is possible to build plane-safe NPP.
Maybe yes, maybe no. Some CANDU negatives I'll chip in though: CANDU is one of the more successful vectors to creating nuclear-armed states; and it's not all that reliable - the uptime of the Bruce reactors is tolerable if you adopt a flexible definition.
Uranium fuels were never deployed because of cost or safety, they were deployed because various militaries funded the technology for use a) producing plutonium for weapons, and b) producing energy for large Navy customers.
Civilian nuclear energy based on the uranium fuel cycle is a spin off from a warfighter's R&D project.
Compare that with the thorium fuel cycle which does not produce weaponizable byproducts.
Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not. That is, if the reactor starts to overheat will that make it generate more power or less. In light water reactors, such as pretty much all existing commercial reactors, you need complicated feedback systems to keep the reactor under control. And if those are damaged, as at Fukushima, you're looking at a melt down.
>Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not.
The void coefficient is only appropriate, when you are dealing with a criticality accident like in Chernobyl. Criticality accident (fission chain reaction getting out of hand) has never happened in commercially used Western reactors. In fact, in Western countries you can not get a license for a reactor design, which has positive temperature coefficient for power i.e. the fission power must decrease, if temperature increases.
95% of the power generated in Norway comes from hydropower[1] so we already have a sustainable and green power source. I think it's more likely that the government sees power generation in Norway as a "solved" problem, and wants to be careful about introducing nuclear power. The general opinion is basically "nuclear is dangerous!", and no-one wants to be the first politician to support it.
"Norwegian crude oil production peaked in 2001 and as of 2012 it has declined about 50% from the peak. This fact has been overshadowed by the oil price growth in recent years."
No, no, theyre fully aware of that. The people behind this are the Halden Reactor Project, they already operate this small nuclear reactor that was (don't know if it still is) used to power a paper mill. The whole thing is just for some clout in world research. Leave it to the Norwegians!
They're a wonderful bunch of people, I had the chance to study some safety in software engineering principles with them, about 6 months ago. I had no idea they were planning to implement Thorium.
They do a huge bunch of research in Human Factors, and half of the team basically hack about with Kinects as their job designing AR solutions rehearsing dangerous nuclear sites/oil rigs
Actually, that's not being cynical. A lot of engineering brainpower goes to the oil industry since it is so big. Almost any engineering company has oil and gas companies as their biggest customers. In comparison, hydroelectric is mainly maintenance and upgrades since most of the waterfalls have been built out.
Good point. The Norwegian oil companies are, in fact, swimming in money (mainly due to high oil prices), but getting oil up from the North Sea in 2012 is vastly more complex than drilling a hole in the ground and attaching a hose to it. There are lots of incredibly smart and dedicated people working in these companies.
Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.
That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons.
OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise.
That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are treated as if it was a proposal to build 1050s Soviet-style reactors.
I am not trying to be hostile here, but you are making the exact same assumptions and fallacies as most of the Norwegian detractors to thorium reactor research. Although the criticism I was referring to in my post was rather the type you most commonly see: Uninformed dismissals of the type "We're still feeling the effects of Chernobyl", "Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe" and "Nuclear waste cannot be handled in a safe way".
Traditional counterarguments to nuclear energy should not be enough to dismiss using a couple of million a year to look into promising, alternate solutions.
> ..would be rather 'pissing in the ocean' though on this issue, don't you think? (and thus could be considered a waste of money)
Again, as he stated. You are basing your hypothesis off of old nuclear technology. The same arguments were made against solar and wind. Many still believe it is a waste of money, yet we keep funding it. Why not also look into Thorium?
The cost of power from nuclear is quite competitive. Capital costs are high but, like renewables, amortized over a long lifetime with low operational costs. Your wiki link puts nuclear cheaper than solar or offshore wind, and barely more expensive than onshore wind.
Moving to small modular reactors, as many outfits are trying to do, will lower the required investment and time to production. Liquid thorium or fast uranium would largely eliminate long-term storage problem...in fact, we'd eliminate the long-lived wastes we have right now. (In the meantime we should keep wastes in a form we can use for fuel later.)
Renewables are great as far as they go, but there are only so many places you can build a good dam, and wind needs either a large oversupply, an economical energy storage system (which, other than the limited hydro, doesn't exist), a drastically souped-up and expensive power grid, or possibly all three. You don't have to worry about that if you're just adding power on the margins, but you do if you want to run civilization carbon-free. Taking all that into account, it's questionable whether wind would really be cheaper, especially as we're forced to expand into less suitable locations.
> Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.
I checked some facts; 2W / m^2 for wind[0], 1000W / m^2 for nuclear[1]. Even if they didn't account for some infrastructure, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't decrease that number 500 times.
Nuclear fission is one of the most powerful energy sources (in energy per unit of mass of fuel) known to mankind, to be replaced only by fusion and annihilation. Renewables on Earth don't even begin to compare.
I always wonder why people disregard nuclear like its low efficiency. It is taking elements that are inherently (in the case of uranium / plutonium, any passive nuclear power source) or situationally (thorium) emitting radiation (photon emissions, a kind of light, which is a form of energy) and using that heat energy to boil water.
And these unstable atoms were made by exploding stars. It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning that it seems ridiculous to not take advantage of the dense energy gifts of destroyed stars.
> It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning
Yeah, that's why a hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb as a trigger. But getting a stable, self-sustaining fusion reaction would quickly recoup for initial energy investment.
Unfortunately, as for the third reaction, I don't see much future for us using annihilation large-scale, at least in the coming centuries. It's simple: we don't have any antimatter around in significant quantities [0] and making it is a terribly inefficient process.
[0] - maybe it's fortunate; pure antimatter is probably the most dangerous source of energy out there; one mistake and we'd kill ourselves with it.
My mistake! Clearly nuclear is far more energy dense.. memory failure. TBH i thought there would be a far greater exclusion zone around it than shown on your links (good source, btw)-- obviously fission is going to be off the scale on energy/kg of fuel.
Don't forget to consider the cost of externalities (environmental damage, health costs), which probably roughly double the true cost of nonrenewable fuels:
In my mind, we crossed the peak when diesel became more expensive than gasoline, because that meant that availability/exploration became the primary cost instead of refinement (because diesel has more energy and is easier to refine).
In fairness, we won't reach peak coal for at least several more decades, but my guess is that the externalities associated with coal will become unpalatable once a category 5 hurricane takes out New York City or Florida is under water. Or, when disaster relief crosses say 50% of the government's budget.
I forgot to mention that I'm against all new nuclear unless it can burn waste and plutonium. Partially because I saw the reactors underwater outside Omaha and realized that we are only a human error away from a Fukushima event here in the US.
"The four-year test at Norway’s government owned Halden reactor could help thorium inch closer to replacing uranium as a possible safer and more effective nuclear power source. Many people believe that thorium is superior because it leaves less long- lived dangerous waste, makes it far more difficult to fashion bombs, runs more efficiently, and can be made meltdown proof."
Again, I am not an expert on Thorium but it's my understanding that the health and safety risks involved are much lower than traditional nuclear plants.
Wind and hydro does not begin to address the need for exponentially more energy and neither of them are the future in any important factor.
Furthermore. It is estimated that 100.000 people die from the use of coal to generate energy every year. More than nuclear power have ever done ( 4,000 people ever).
The only thing that is problematic with nuclear is storing it, a problem which can be solved.
This is a factual disagreement, hopefully a resolvable one.
Take a look at this book by David MacKay, Cambridge physicist. He presents detailed calculations on each energy source and, despite being anti-nuclear in initial orientation, agrees by the end of the book that nuclear energy is far cheaper and more scalable than any other renewable.
Thanks for, without giving actual examples, telling us that the people opposing nuclear are uninformed and unable to form complete sentences. Without this enlightened information one might have listened to them and judged them based on their arguments. Edit: spelling
Norway might not support, but Finland is majority owner of Fortum (51%), which the news article states as a partner. So governments aren't completely out of the picture.
Fortum actually has slightly more nuclear power production in Sweden than in Finland. But your sentiment rings true, indeed only Finland is pro-nuclear in this common energy market (NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, previously Nord Pool).
But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year.
Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff.
In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.
I was surprised about "about the size of a beach ball". Wikipedia says thorium is 11.7 g per cubic centimeter, so the one ton beach ball works out to a diameter of roughly 55 cm if my math is right, which is a reasonable beach ball. It turns out my intuitions aren't much use with metal beach balls.
People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.
I'm just saying, if people can survive thorium lamps, we can probably manage to use modest amounts of thorium in much more controlled circumstances without undue difficulty.
Comments
If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy.
Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physicists, notably Egil Lillestøl at the University of Bergen, have talked to official figures about this for a long time about this without getting any kind of traction.
Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean and cheap next-generation nuclear power. If these researchers manage to develop something without official support, it would be impressive indeed. That the Norwegian government isn't willing to support clean energy research is really quite baffling, given that the energy sector is hands-down the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy. And Norway has the world's second-largest known thorium reserves. For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.
Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium.
Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all?
I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I would much rather have the focus of the energy industry be solar energy right now.
I hope countries in the future are powered 70-80% by solar, and 20-30% by other sources like nuclear energy (at least until we figure out how to store solar energy cheaply for night use), than the other way around. And we can only get there fast if we have the industry's almost complete focus on solar energy, and have them invest billions into researching it and lowering the cost of solar panels.
Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2].
Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby. Utah doesn't really have the spare water capacity to use it as a potential energy store, either.
The point being that, as great as renewables are, without a way to cheaply store vast amounts of renewable energy or a way to shuffle energy from great distances, it isn't going to work on its own. We need a solid baseline, which, of course, is coal today, but I'd much rather keep looking for better nuclear.
There's a lot of energy in those bonds; I have a great deal of confidence we can find a way to leverage it without all of the nasty side-effect. We just need to get past the knee-jerk reaction of "nuclear is bad" and to a better place of "today's nuclear leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't mean tomorrow's will"[3].
1. http://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm
2. http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Utah/sunshine-by-month...
3. http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html - You can see that Nuclear is far less deadly than coal, but, when things go wrong, it costs a whole lot more than coal.
> Unless you have somewhere to store that solar
You could hollow out a mountain and pump water up and down -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Better still, adjust demand to it changes with supply by having electric cars with removable batteries, the batteries being recharged when there is excess power.
> Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby.
Utah is connected to the rest of the USA. Is it ever not sunny and not windy everywhere?
Canada has already solved most of the typical nuclear problems with the CANDU design and ecosystem.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/CANDU_fue...
CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.
Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.
CANDU reactors are designed to put less radioactive material back into the earth than came out of it, and when problems occur in a CANDU design it fails safe.
>CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.
There is less uranium in the waste, but there will be fission products and trans-uranium elements just like in the fuel of regular reactors. Radioactivity of uranium is hardly a problem, when dealing with spent fuel. In short term (less than 100 years) fission products produce most of the radioactivity. In long term trans-uranium elements are the problem.
>Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.
Halting a normal fission chain reaction is hardly a source of accidents in any current nuclear reactor design. Decay heat is produced in the spent nuclear fuel of CANDUs just like in Fukushima or Three Mile Island.
CANDU is an interesting reactor design, but there is none as great alternative as you propose. However, various active and passive safety measures may get you very close. I don't know CANDU design so well, that I could judge those.
Interesting, I thought the large heat sink inherent in the CANDU design essentially ensured that with no human interaction that CANDU reactors would failsafe. My understanding was such that the 'reactor' might be destroyed but the design was such that the failure cascade would not release radioactive materials outside of the containment units.
As I said, I don't know the safety systems of CANDU :)
Large heat sink buys you time to get the cooling working again. Ultimately the heat must be transferred out somehow. In modern reactor designs these systems are usually designed to passively for very long times. With CANDU's it is very likely to be the case too.
In nuclear engineering one must always consider also the chance, that not everything is working as designed (like the destroyed diesel generators and external power sources at Fukushima). PRA (Probabilistic Risk Analysis) is used for that. PRA analysis are used for detecting most vulnerable systems in a nuclear power plant and this information is used to design new safer reactor types and to update the old ones little by little to be still safer. Harsh weather, seismic activity etc. is also considered in these analysis, but sadly in Fukushima even detected vulnerabilities didn't lead to improvements in time.
Even, if everything is done as well as possible, there is still a chance (although with modern designs almost arbitrarily small) that under certain conditions all the safety systems will fail. An ultimate example of such an event, would be a 100 km meteorite smashing the plant to atoms.
would be a 100 km meteorite smashing the plant to atoms
Or an airplane...
At least in European Union new nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a collision of any currently used commercial airplane.
That's nice. Except these facilities tend to last 50+ years, and planes keep getting bigger...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/vulnerable-to-pl...
None of Germany's nuclear power plants is built after 2001. Before that hardly anyone cared about planes, when designing nuclear power plant.
None of Germany's nuclear power plants is built after 2001.
Yes. I guess we'll be fine if we just kindly ask those terrorists to not crash their planes into an older plant.
We agree on older plants being not as safe as new ones. My original sentence was about things you just can't prepare for (with any reasonable means). After that I just wanted to say, that it is possible to build plane-safe NPP.
Maybe yes, maybe no. Some CANDU negatives I'll chip in though: CANDU is one of the more successful vectors to creating nuclear-armed states; and it's not all that reliable - the uptime of the Bruce reactors is tolerable if you adopt a flexible definition.
Uranium fuels were never deployed because of cost or safety, they were deployed because various militaries funded the technology for use a) producing plutonium for weapons, and b) producing energy for large Navy customers.
Civilian nuclear energy based on the uranium fuel cycle is a spin off from a warfighter's R&D project.
Compare that with the thorium fuel cycle which does not produce weaponizable byproducts.
If anyone should know about funding military projects, it's a user named "politician"! :)
Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not. That is, if the reactor starts to overheat will that make it generate more power or less. In light water reactors, such as pretty much all existing commercial reactors, you need complicated feedback systems to keep the reactor under control. And if those are damaged, as at Fukushima, you're looking at a melt down.
>Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not.
The void coefficient is only appropriate, when you are dealing with a criticality accident like in Chernobyl. Criticality accident (fission chain reaction getting out of hand) has never happened in commercially used Western reactors. In fact, in Western countries you can not get a license for a reactor design, which has positive temperature coefficient for power i.e. the fission power must decrease, if temperature increases.
Being cynical, perhaps the fact they're swimming in oil makes them disintersted as a nation in developing alternative energy.
95% of the power generated in Norway comes from hydropower[1] so we already have a sustainable and green power source. I think it's more likely that the government sees power generation in Norway as a "solved" problem, and wants to be careful about introducing nuclear power. The general opinion is basically "nuclear is dangerous!", and no-one wants to be the first politician to support it.
[1]: Source: http://www.ssb.no/energi/ (Norwegian site)
"Norwegian crude oil production peaked in 2001 and as of 2012 it has declined about 50% from the peak. This fact has been overshadowed by the oil price growth in recent years."
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9166
No, no, theyre fully aware of that. The people behind this are the Halden Reactor Project, they already operate this small nuclear reactor that was (don't know if it still is) used to power a paper mill. The whole thing is just for some clout in world research. Leave it to the Norwegians!
They're a wonderful bunch of people, I had the chance to study some safety in software engineering principles with them, about 6 months ago. I had no idea they were planning to implement Thorium.
They do a huge bunch of research in Human Factors, and half of the team basically hack about with Kinects as their job designing AR solutions rehearsing dangerous nuclear sites/oil rigs
Actually, that's not being cynical. A lot of engineering brainpower goes to the oil industry since it is so big. Almost any engineering company has oil and gas companies as their biggest customers. In comparison, hydroelectric is mainly maintenance and upgrades since most of the waterfalls have been built out.
Good point. The Norwegian oil companies are, in fact, swimming in money (mainly due to high oil prices), but getting oil up from the North Sea in 2012 is vastly more complex than drilling a hole in the ground and attaching a hose to it. There are lots of incredibly smart and dedicated people working in these companies.
>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad
Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.
That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons.
OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...
That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are treated as if it was a proposal to build 1050s Soviet-style reactors.
I am not trying to be hostile here, but you are making the exact same assumptions and fallacies as most of the Norwegian detractors to thorium reactor research. Although the criticism I was referring to in my post was rather the type you most commonly see: Uninformed dismissals of the type "We're still feeling the effects of Chernobyl", "Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe" and "Nuclear waste cannot be handled in a safe way".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html
Traditional counterarguments to nuclear energy should not be enough to dismiss using a couple of million a year to look into promising, alternate solutions.
>It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for [thorium]..
Nor did i ever suggest it was! (NB: 'OTOH').
>a couple of million
..would be rather 'pissing in the ocean' though on this issue, don't you think? (and thus could be considered a waste of money)
> ..would be rather 'pissing in the ocean' though on this issue, don't you think? (and thus could be considered a waste of money)
Again, as he stated. You are basing your hypothesis off of old nuclear technology. The same arguments were made against solar and wind. Many still believe it is a waste of money, yet we keep funding it. Why not also look into Thorium?
The cost of power from nuclear is quite competitive. Capital costs are high but, like renewables, amortized over a long lifetime with low operational costs. Your wiki link puts nuclear cheaper than solar or offshore wind, and barely more expensive than onshore wind.
Moving to small modular reactors, as many outfits are trying to do, will lower the required investment and time to production. Liquid thorium or fast uranium would largely eliminate long-term storage problem...in fact, we'd eliminate the long-lived wastes we have right now. (In the meantime we should keep wastes in a form we can use for fuel later.)
Renewables are great as far as they go, but there are only so many places you can build a good dam, and wind needs either a large oversupply, an economical energy storage system (which, other than the limited hydro, doesn't exist), a drastically souped-up and expensive power grid, or possibly all three. You don't have to worry about that if you're just adding power on the margins, but you do if you want to run civilization carbon-free. Taking all that into account, it's questionable whether wind would really be cheaper, especially as we're forced to expand into less suitable locations.
> Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.
I checked some facts; 2W / m^2 for wind[0], 1000W / m^2 for nuclear[1]. Even if they didn't account for some infrastructure, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't decrease that number 500 times.
Nuclear fission is one of the most powerful energy sources (in energy per unit of mass of fuel) known to mankind, to be replaced only by fusion and annihilation. Renewables on Earth don't even begin to compare.
[0] - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_33....
[1] - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...
I always wonder why people disregard nuclear like its low efficiency. It is taking elements that are inherently (in the case of uranium / plutonium, any passive nuclear power source) or situationally (thorium) emitting radiation (photon emissions, a kind of light, which is a form of energy) and using that heat energy to boil water.
And these unstable atoms were made by exploding stars. It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning that it seems ridiculous to not take advantage of the dense energy gifts of destroyed stars.
> It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning
Yeah, that's why a hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb as a trigger. But getting a stable, self-sustaining fusion reaction would quickly recoup for initial energy investment.
Unfortunately, as for the third reaction, I don't see much future for us using annihilation large-scale, at least in the coming centuries. It's simple: we don't have any antimatter around in significant quantities [0] and making it is a terribly inefficient process.
[0] - maybe it's fortunate; pure antimatter is probably the most dangerous source of energy out there; one mistake and we'd kill ourselves with it.
My mistake! Clearly nuclear is far more energy dense.. memory failure. TBH i thought there would be a far greater exclusion zone around it than shown on your links (good source, btw)-- obviously fission is going to be off the scale on energy/kg of fuel.
Don't forget to consider the cost of externalities (environmental damage, health costs), which probably roughly double the true cost of nonrenewable fuels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...
Also, as for the comments that oil is still king in terms of absolute price, keep in mind that we probably peaked around 2004:
https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2008_fot...
In my mind, we crossed the peak when diesel became more expensive than gasoline, because that meant that availability/exploration became the primary cost instead of refinement (because diesel has more energy and is easier to refine).
In fairness, we won't reach peak coal for at least several more decades, but my guess is that the externalities associated with coal will become unpalatable once a category 5 hurricane takes out New York City or Florida is under water. Or, when disaster relief crosses say 50% of the government's budget.
I forgot to mention that I'm against all new nuclear unless it can burn waste and plutonium. Partially because I saw the reactors underwater outside Omaha and realized that we are only a human error away from a Fukushima event here in the US.
From the article:
"The four-year test at Norway’s government owned Halden reactor could help thorium inch closer to replacing uranium as a possible safer and more effective nuclear power source. Many people believe that thorium is superior because it leaves less long- lived dangerous waste, makes it far more difficult to fashion bombs, runs more efficiently, and can be made meltdown proof."
Again, I am not an expert on Thorium but it's my understanding that the health and safety risks involved are much lower than traditional nuclear plants.
Wind and hydro does not begin to address the need for exponentially more energy and neither of them are the future in any important factor.
Furthermore. It is estimated that 100.000 people die from the use of coal to generate energy every year. More than nuclear power have ever done ( 4,000 people ever).
The only thing that is problematic with nuclear is storing it, a problem which can be solved.
This is a factual disagreement, hopefully a resolvable one.
Take a look at this book by David MacKay, Cambridge physicist. He presents detailed calculations on each energy source and, despite being anti-nuclear in initial orientation, agrees by the end of the book that nuclear energy is far cheaper and more scalable than any other renewable.
http://www.withouthotair.com/
"Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just pro-arithmetic. — David MacKay"
Thanks for, without giving actual examples, telling us that the people opposing nuclear are uninformed and unable to form complete sentences. Without this enlightened information one might have listened to them and judged them based on their arguments. Edit: spelling
Perhaps you could introduce some arguments for this opposition instead of just do what you complain about.
Norway might not support, but Finland is majority owner of Fortum (51%), which the news article states as a partner. So governments aren't completely out of the picture. Fortum actually has slightly more nuclear power production in Sweden than in Finland. But your sentiment rings true, indeed only Finland is pro-nuclear in this common energy market (NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, previously Nord Pool).
> Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean
Only for some definitions of clean. Forget the radiation, Thorium's toxicity profile is not pretty. Hell, the damn thing is pyrophoric.
Hats off to the engineers if they can make a more sensible reactor out of it.
But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year.
Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff.
In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.
I was surprised about "about the size of a beach ball". Wikipedia says thorium is 11.7 g per cubic centimeter, so the one ton beach ball works out to a diameter of roughly 55 cm if my math is right, which is a reasonable beach ball. It turns out my intuitions aren't much use with metal beach balls.
People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.
I'm just saying, if people can survive thorium lamps, we can probably manage to use modest amounts of thorium in much more controlled circumstances without undue difficulty.
Great Scott! That's almost enough to power a flux capacitor.
For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.
To democracy! All hail the will of the people!