Thorium is to nuclear power what the fifth Beatle was to pop music. It's the nuclear fuel that showed glorious promise in the early days of atomic energy but somehow, somewhere along the way, got forgotten.
I first learned about India's plans to revive thorium power in 2009 when I started writing Geek Nation, a book that explores India's apparent ambitions to become a scientific superpower. I was given rare access to the sprawling hub for the country's civilian nuclear program, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, not far from Bombay. Research into thorium-fuelled reactors has been happening on this site since 1955 (a fact made obvious by the feeling of stepping into a time-warp when you pass through the security barriers) and is finally approaching its zenith. It's a project that encapsulates India's dreams to become a global technological leader.
Thorium is the original nuclear fuel. It powered the world's first full-scale atomic power station, built in 1954 in Shippingport in Pennsylvania. And at the time, it seemed ideal: more energy is released by thorium than by the same amount of uranium fuel, which means it creates less waste. It also has fewer long-lived waste elements, which don't need to be stored under such tight conditions or for so long. But after Shippingport was proven to work, uranium became the favored nuclear fuel instead, partly because the properties of thorium meant it couldn't be refined to make weapons.
Today, as the availability and price of uranium becomes a possible barrier to the growth of nuclear power and as nations begin the search for cleaner and safer fuels, thorium is making a comeback, with India leading the way.
"In India, the supply of thorium is at least eight times that of uranium," I was told by Dr. Ratan Kumar Sinha, the director of the reactor design and development group at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Indeed, there are millions of tons of monazite -- the ore from which thorium is extracted -- lying on Indian beaches. His team is now working on an Advanced Heavy Water Reactor, powered by thorium, designed to have a lifespan of a hundred years. It is slated to be up and running within the next couple of years. And if it's successful, the government plans to roll it out as one of India's next-generation power sources.
But these thorium reactors represent something more than simply India's ambitions to expand its energy infrastructure. Like China, this nation of geeks is building a formidable expertise in indigenous nuclear technology.
According to the World Nuclear Association, India wants to supply a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050, up from around three percent now. Sinha's hope is that it might eventually supply half. The civilian nuclear power program also has one eye on the export market -- selling smaller nuclear reactors to developing nations that are desperate for more carbon-free energy.
The country's space program is another example of India's long-term thinking when it comes to science and engineering. Launched in the same year as NASA's first moon landings, the Indian Space Research Organization has gone from a modest satellite-launching project to sending a probe to the moon in 2008. Now, it is planning its first manned mission. G. Madhavan Nair, a rocket scientist and the Indian Space Research Organisation's former Chairman, told me in 2010, "The presence of man in the outer space is going to be one of the major requirements for the future space community." Another veteran space scientist suggested to me that India might also one day need to mine resources on other planets.
It's easy to be skeptical about the achievements of Indian scientists. They haven't made nearly as much of a mark as the Chinese have, and in terms of patents and publications, they still lag behind Europe, the U.S., Australia and Japan. But by the end of my research for Geek Nation, it became clear that this was a nation planning for the far future. And not just any future: a technological one.
For all of the cheap generic pharmaceutical labs, unimaginative IT outsourcing companies and charges of mediocrity against Indian scientific institutions over the last two decades, there is a growing resolve to invest in the long-term growth of science and technology. The government is building hundreds of new universities and engineering colleges, with the aim of more than doubling student numbers. There are also plans for a $250 million neutrino observatory, which would boost India's international standing in particle physics.
Yet no story quite captures India's remarkable power to think long-term quite like that of thorium. Quietly researching this fuel for decades, Indian scientists have waited for just the right moment to build their first thorium-powered nuclear reactor. If the rest of the world believes India to be a sleeping elephant that is finally rising, then this tale reveals just how much more there will be to see when the elephant is fully awake.
There is a quote that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has borrowed twice from the legendary wartime British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (both times in speeches to the Indian Science Congress, the nation's biggest annual science meet), which sums up his country's ambitions quite neatly: "The empires of the future are going to be the empires of the mind."
Kelly Rigg: The Importance of Impossible Ambitions
Nuclear Power in India | Indian Nuclear Energy
Safe nuclear: India's thorium reactor | SmartPlanet
India plans 'safer' nuclear plant powered by thorium | Environment ...
A future energy giant? India's thorium-based nuclear plans
Guys, gals, people abroad - effective policy is found through measurement, not thought up. It takes a nation of brilliant researchers to figure out firstly what a brilliant energy policy should look like. Then, the technologies that will best accomplish the desired task need long-term research to develop - the kind of research that only national research programs will choose to undertake.
Science is a process of finding answers that reflect reality. It uses the scientific method to counteract public and personal biases, in the search of one thing: the truth. India will be among the first of the nations to implement the scientific political process to solve the problems that the free market has no hope of getting around to doing. Energy independence, energy economics, and energy local and global effects are only among the first of many issues that will be handed into the trusting hands of science.
India, continue boldly into the 21st century with the best of human values, leading your people with truth, and the power of unadulterated science to find that truth. We shall watch the dreams of your most brilliant people become the beautiful reality of tomorrow, and all of us in the scientifically deprived United States will watch with praise and regret, as we sluggishly realize the painful mistake we have made all of our nation's life.
If IRAN was using Thorium no one could complain !
:-)
India's choice of reactors is based on its past experience, and based on maximizing its breeding ratio in order to boot up a self-sustainable fuel cycle. Once the fuel cycle is self-sustaining, then obviously India then has the room to switch to LFTR tech like Sorenson's designs. But everything first depends on getting that fuel cycle going first.
I agree Thorium is a good choice and scientists and engineers in India seem to have developed a substantial expertise in its use. It has all the positives, except maybe one or two such as the requirement that it needs to be bombarded with subatomic particles until it decays into uranium-233. It has many plus points such as available in abundance, more release of energy for the the same quantity, dealing with wastes is nowhere as thorny as in a Uranium reactors, and above all safety.
Elsewhere in that Chapter the author has stated that the fear of nuclear apocalypse has been replaced by the fear of climate change. Here I do not agree, and in this context I support the use of Uranium reactors too and hope no more uranium goes towards nuclear Arsenals.
Based on what? A sixty year old reactor design that they are building?
None of the "pluses" amount to any economic advantage. All of the minuses add up to pretty much exactly the same risk that you have with uranium fueled reactors. The rest is basically the fanboys praising a technology that wasn't given a chance to blow up in real life because nobody has used it, yet.
@ SJ (and similar closed minds) :
Agreed… Be happy.
@ Others :
There is nothing `sixty year old` about it except the material – The Thorium idea - The design always takes care of the latest technology, developed in this case by the Indian Scientists, and now being taken seriously by Scientists from France , Japan and Canada.
If someone can say it is not economical… we must look into that someone`s calculations and check for errors.
As far as `risk` is concerned… It’s a question of taking care of it in design. Its there in every venture… What are Engineers there for?
I am not in the line, but I suppose if we require a continuous generation of energy at a predetermined constant level, we must begin at a slightly higher level and then apply controls in a way that the `multiplication factor` is always close to unity.
Even taking care of external forces is a measure of design…a proper assessment of these forces at their maxm.. How frequent …and consequently what should be the safety margins considering Importance factors etc.
@SJ again:
Best wishes
We were on track to eliminate combustion power by 2000 (and most global warming) in 1962...
http://tinyurl.com/6xgpkfa
But, Nixon fumbled it (12 min in here)... http://tinyurl.com/73p7ler
And the promise of Thorium power, especially in molten-salt reactors, is coming back, finally. Too late to avoid some real environmental tragedies, but that's how humans work...
http://ThoriumRemix.com/2011
http://tinyurl.com/8xmso5v
www.thoriumenergyalliance.com
www.itheo.org/articles/announcing-thec12-shanghai (be there Huff, or be square)
--
Dr. A. Cannara
650-400-3071
What is the carbon/toxic footprint legacy of solar/wind????
It's backup generators was placed above the tsunami level, as all the others should have been.
So talk about Fukushima is talk about the Japanese govt's lax regulation, land use and TEPCO's decades of cheating on designs. It's not talk about "nuclear power". Check the 17 Oct. 2011 New Yorker piece by Osnos to see in its last paragraph, the absurd negligence that allowed homes, businesses, LNG terminals & nukes to be built in known tsunami zones.
Today, they're retrofitting other reactors that might suffer such threats, and one utility is indeed pursuing Molten-salt reactors, which don't explode or need anyone to shut them down.
For the German political naivete or just lack of responsibility -- the ~50 megatons of new CO2 emissions to be caused by German nuke closures will, each year, cause more emissions than all the fuel burned by all the aircraft in all theatres, by all sides, in all the years of WWII. Now that's a real problem. An unnecessary one at that.
That silliness aside, I am anxious to see how thorium-fueled power works out. It would be nice to be able to have nuclear energy that's not so filthy and less capable of being used for aggression.
Don't believe the spin on thorium being a greener nuclear option | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Health/Environment Issues Linked to the Nuclear Fuel Chain -- Section B
extensive greenhouse gases
India rejection of nuclear power.
Solar and wind are diffuse......
It's like trying to use a bunch of little streams to make up for electricity that will no longer be generated from Niagra falls.........
I don't know what that is so difficult for some people to get.....
Solar is fine for a home..., but probably won't work for heavy industry.........
One study estimates a start up inventory on the order of 3000 kg/GWe (U-233, U-235, or Pu-239), and enriched to 20% U-235 or 12% U-233.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2007.07.047
The enrichment technology used to create all this start-up fuel is a proliferation risk, is it not? How do LFTR proponents propose to mitigate this risk … with a centralized production and global enrichment facility? What problems to you foresee in such an approach?
As for thorium, it is not clear why a higher natural abundance of thorium is an actual economic factor in operation of reactors. Uranium is dirt cheap. So cheap, indeed, that it does not make any dent in the actual cost of operating nuclear reactors.
As for the radiation problems with thorium reactors... they are slightly different from Uranium reactors. So we replace one set of problems with another... it is not clear to me why this would make reactors safer. The current safety record of these reactors is only great because there are none. As soon as we start building hundreds of them, accidents will happen, like in any other nuclear facility.
That India is interested in nuclear technology is easily understandable from technological, political and sociological points of view. But that alone does not make Indias decision to go nuclear an economically rational choice.
No, actually, that's why it DOESN'T make a difference. We don't have high fuel prices for nuclear reactors with either fuel.
The only other "energy product" from nuclear power is heat. You can, if you want, heat buildings with it. Reactors for chemical processing are probably an economic loser, anyway, as most chemical processes don't require a lot of low temperature heat, and many that do, are couples do other processes in the same plants that provide this heat, already.