The ongoing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has focused the world's attention on the harmful potential of nuclear energy and spurred the search for alternative sources of electrical power. Seemingly endless media reports discuss green alternatives such as solar, wind, hydro electric and geothermal while totally overlooking the Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), a safe, cheap, efficient and proven technology for nuclear power generation NOT using uranium.

Fukushima Daiichi, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and 100% of the commercial nuclear power plants in the US (plus the vast majority worldwide) are uranium fueled. These reactors use solid uranium fuel rods, are water cooled and operate at very high internal pressure, requiring massive containment vessels. When media commentators and scientific experts alike speak of the danger potential of nuclear energy they have uranium reactors in mind and are most likely are ignorant of the "the other" nuclear fuel, thorium, and its advantages.

At the dawn of the nuclear age both uranium and thorium reactors were under development. The subsequent predominance of the uranium version resulted from multiple influences including military, commercial and political factors during the Cold War era. For example, Admiral Hyman Rickover's preference of the uranium fuel reactors to power the US Navy's fleet of nuclear submarines contributed to the national focus on this approach.

One byproduct of solid uranium fueled nuclear reactors is plutonium. Plutonium happens to be just dandy for making atomic bombs, and the United States built thousands of these in the Cold War period. This led to encouragement of uranium reactors for electrical power generation by US companies, principally General Electric and Westinghouse. These companies became leaders in reactor design and, with governmental support, exported their technology to counties like Japan, whose Fukushima Daiichi plant is a GE design. They also provided the uranium solid fuel rods, at great profit, to the US and to countries that have no uranium, including Japan. It turns out that the reactor builders were following the Gillette Razor business model, that is to sell the reactors (or shavers) at cost and make real profits on the fuel rods (or blades). This model is still in force.

Although uranium reactors have caused very few deaths since their inception, the forced evacuation of over 20,000 people caused by radioactive leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi incident argues against continued reliance on this means of electrical power generation. As stated by Bram Cohen in Safety Magazine:

"The ongoing Fukushima Daiichi disaster is naturally making many people wonder about the safety of nuclear power. It's a good illustration of how unexpected failures happen in practice, and also shows how Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is a fundamentally safer approach. When building a reliable system, you must assume it will fail. Regardless of how many layers of safety you build into something, what really determines its fundamental safety is what happens if all safety systems fail at once. For a nuclear facility … you must also make a fundamental engineering assumption that it will melt down. And not only that, but there should be contingency plans for what happens when the plant is hit with God's flyswatter, not because such a thing is likely or even possible, but because you can't really be too paranoid about engineering for such scenarios."

As for the LFTR approach, he says "no existing reactors have near the potential safety features of a LFTR, which can be designed to limit the amount of damage that happens if everything, and I mean everything fails.

1. Since a LFTR is preferably liquid salt and gas cooled instead of water cooled, there isn't any chance of a steam explosion or water cracking into hydrogen. Also, since the cooling system is passive, a loss of power would not result in overheating from cooling stopping.
2. A LFTR operates at normal atmospheric pressure, resulting in vastly reduced chances of explosion, because there isn't any pressure being contained to begin with.
3. If a LFTR should somehow overheat, it can be designed with passive safety systems like draining the liquid fuel from the core to passive cooling tanks which will simply shut it off. In fact doing this occasionally is part of normal plant operation and maintenance.
4. Even if every one of the above systems fail, a LFTR has the fundamental safety property that it barely has positive reactivity to begin with. It's so difficult to get it to even get hot (normally the core must be 90% graphite or it won't even function) that practically any type of failure will necessarily change the geometry to be subcritical. Any spilled liquid salts would soon result in a slightly radioactive but very stable chunk of slag.
5. Large LFTR plants would be made from modular units, which naturally contain failures to a single unit, and have greater surface area so in the event of total cooling system failure simple heat dissipation is much more effective. Also, small units are easy to physically secure, for example, they can be suspended on cables, making the chances of earthquake damage even from record-shattering quakes remote. (Remarkably, some nuclear plants already do this, showing just how seriously designers take safety at some facilities.)

Other advantages of LFTRs include:

1. Cheap and abundant fuel. Kirk Sorensen of Energy From Thorium (http://energyfromthorium.com) estimates that a single rare earth mine under development in Missouri will produce 5 tons of thorium a year as a byproduct, and that this would be enough to fuel the entire world's electric needs for one year!
2. Scalability - LFTR reactors can be made very small and because they do not require elaborate shielding or containment vessels, they could be located where the electricity is needed.
3. The ability to locate LFTR power generators wherever power is consumed means much reduced need for very inefficient long distance power transmission and complex, vulnerable transmission grids.
4. LFTR generators like the one shown below can be mass produced on assembly lines and trucked to the installation site, thus reducing their cost per watt generated to a level at or below current costs for fossil fuel generation. Such generators could produce 10 to 100 megawatts of power each.

As stated in Accelerating Future "A hypothetical 5 ton, truck-sized 1 MW thorium reactor might run for only $250,000 but would generate enough electricity for 1,000 people for the duration of its operating lifetime, using only 20 kg of thorium fuel per year, running almost automatically, and requiring safety checks as infrequently as once a year. That would be as little as $200/year after capital costs are paid off, for a thousand-persons worth of electricity! An annual visit by a safety inspector might add another $200 to the bill."

 So why isn't the world demanding LFTRs? Why is it the environmental community not behind this approach? Where is the government backing? Is it, as Hugh Gusterson surmises in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, because

 "…we now have a government captured by special interests, paralyzed by partisanship, and confused by astroturfing political groups and phony scientific experts for sale to the highest bidder. Our democracy and our regulatory agencies are husks of what they once were. It is unclear that such a system is capable of learning any lessons or indeed of doing anything much beyond generating speeches and passing the responsibility for failure back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball between our two yapping political parties. While we are distracted by the theater of Congress and the White House, our fate lies in other hands."?

 Although this may be part of the problem, I attribute ignorance on the part of our politicians and pundits as the major cause and therefore resolve to send this article, many references and continuing follow ups to them and hope that All Cities members will join me in bringing this "invisible" technology into the open. It may just be the silver bullet for our energy future.

Tom Eversole
All Cities Green/Tech Group

P.S.

Dear Andy:

Thanks for chiming in about this technology at the All Cities High Tech meeting today. Your description of these reactors as being basically nuclear batteries that pose little risk and can be disbursed wherever needed was perfect. The fact that you and I seemed to be the only ones in the room who were acquainted with this option was expected but disappointing. And, as mentioned, my limited knowledge is thanks to my business partner, Bill Bustamante.

I believe that it is essential to bring this safe and comparatively inexpensive alternative to the currently "standard" nuclear power generation technology to the attention of our government representatives and to the general public through the "news" media. Obviously both groups have overlooked or ignored this far safer option, most likely because the currently favored technology benefits certain major corporations with vested interest in the status quo, not to mention the media. All current discussions focus on the demonstrated risks of existing nuclear power plants with zero mention of safer alternative technology.

I propose to write our Senators and Representatives here in California and to demand their investigation of and reporting (to the public) on the comparative safety and cost effectiveness of these technologies. If you believe this to be a worthwhile endeavor, I ask you to collaborate with me and others to compose a letter demanding recognition of the thorium cycle reactor as a safe and viable alternative to currently "standard" reactors. Will you join me? Not as a corporate representative but as an interested and knowledgeable private citizen ?

By way of disclosure, I have absolutely no financial interest in or personal connection to anyone or anything in the nuclear power industry.

Let's talk about this.

Tom