Norway ringing in thorium nuclear New Year with Westinghouse at the party

[wtmusic]

"SHANGHAI - A privately held Norwegian company will start burning thorium fuel in a conventional test reactor owned by Norway’s government with help from U.S.-based nuclear giant Westinghouse, the company revealed here recently.

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.

Oslo-based Thor Energy will deploy a mix of solid thorium mixed with plutonium - a blend known as “thorium MOX” - Thor’s chief technology officer Julian Kelly told the Thorium Energy Conference 2012. I first reported this for the Weinberg Foundation, a London-based non-profit that promotes safe, alternative nuclear power, for whom I covered the conference."

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/norway-ringing-in-thorium-nuclear-new-year-with-westinghouse-at-the-party/6421

Norway has always been opposed to traditional nuclear power but will soon be a leader in thorium MSR tech. While the DOE twiddles its thumbs.

[joshcryer]

1. We're saved!

[drm604]

2. Thorium mixed with plutonium.

Doesn't the plutonium hurt the whole "less dangerous waste" aspect of it? I don't know. I'm not an expert, just wondering.

[wtmusic]

3. Yes, it does.

This is a research reactor so quantities are small, power generation is small. And it's solid fuel; the goal is eventually to move to a liquid fuel mix.

In a molten-salt reactor fissile material (U-232, decayed from thorium) circulates in a big tub with melted salt at about 600ºF. As it reacts it heats water and drives a turbine like a solid fuel reactor. But having it mixed in a liquid makes a core meltdown impossible (it's already melted). If it gets too hot, the mixture melts a plug at the bottom of the reactor and it drains into separate tanks, stopping the reaction.

Beyond safety, another benefit is burning up existing nuclear waste. We can dump existing waste into the salt mixture and it not only contributes to the reaction, but comes out in a much less radioactive form.

This concept works - a functional MSR was built in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. With a reactor vessel about the size of about 5 bathtubs, it generated 8 megawatts of power, enough to power 800 homes.

http://www.thorium-now.org

[drm604]

4. Don't get me wrong. I've been interested in the idea of thorium reactors.

I was just troubled by the introduction of plutonium.

I'm not sure that I follow what you're saying. Are you saying that the goal is to get it to work without the plutonium? Are you saying that plutonium is being reduced to a less dangerous form?

Is the plutonium at all necessary to the current design, or is it there just to be reduced into something less dangerous?

[wtmusic]

5. The thorium fuel cycle requires an initiator material (Pu or U-235) to get the "fire started"

Thorium is not fissile by it's own but when it gets knocked by a neutron it transmutes into U-233, which is fissile and is capable of sustaining a chain reaction. The initiator transmutes through it's own fuel cycle into (relatively) benign materials.

Thorium itself is only slightly radioactive, and about as common as lead in the Earth's crust.

In an MSR, once you get ithe reaction started you can keep it going indefinitely by adding more thorium. I'm not sure why they're using it as a solid fuel here but probably just to get data on the reaction.

[drm604]

6. So that means there'd be an ongoing need for either Pu or U-235.

So we'd have to either breed the Pu or enrich Uranium. Too bad we can't get away from that.

[FBaggins]

8. No shortage of plutonium in the world.

And it lasts a really long time.

Keep in mind that this is consuming plutonium (so it can help us "get away from that&quot ... and if you burn up all the plutonium you can get your hands on, you can recycle the U233.

[wtmusic]

9. The amount of U-235 required to start the reaction is probably less

than the amount in fly ash hoisted into the atmosphere by a large coal plant every day.

Reactor U-235 is enriched to only about 8% purity so it would take a lot of work to make a weapon out of it. The U-233 inside the vessel is actually much more dangerous - but in a sense it's too dangerous. Before it decays inside the vessel, its gamma ray output is so hot it would be extremely difficult to fashion into a bomb without getting yourself cooked.

[FBaggins]

7. Why they're using solid fuel

My guess is that it's an existing reactor. As you said, this isn't about mocking up a reactor so much as gathering data on the reaction.