Well he came home from the war
With a party in his head
And an idea for a fireworks display
;;;; Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
I spent much of the Solstice/Christmas/New Year's break thinking about the future of this blog. I am happy to report that more a few lurkers broke their silence to urge me to continue the good fight against the forces of ignorance. Thank you for the vote of confidence. I'm going to try to make the Island a more entertaining and provocative place, while still focusing on the science of climatology, and the policy implications that come with it. So let's get right to it, with a look at James Hansen's latest appeal to authority.
NASA's chief climatologist has released a letter addressed to the president elect and his wife, and signed by himself and his wife, and delivered through their mutual acquaintance, the new White House science adviser, John Holdren. He introduces the letter by recognizing that many of those who have been following his career have urged him to stick to explaining the science rather than continue to foray into helping set policy, advice he rejects thusly:
Politicians are happy if scientists provide information and then go away and shut up. But science and policy cannot be divorced. What I learned in the past few years is that politicians often adopt convenient policies that can be shown to be inconsistent with long-term success, given readily available scientific data and empirical information on policy impacts.
This kind of thinking won't endear him to the likes of Roger Pielke, Jr, but I doubt that's going to stop him. And given Hansen's habit of backing up his policy suggestions with solid science, nor should it. To wit:
Geophysical limits dictate the outline for what must be done.
For those who have been following Hansen's letters over the last year or so, there's not much new in the first two sections of this latest missive. First comes a call for a "moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that do not capture and store CO2" (by 2030). Then we have the familiar argument in favor of a "rising price on carbon emissions via a carbon tax and 100% dividend." The second of these seems to be gaining ground across the political spectrum, and the first probably just received a big boost from the disaster in Tennessee (a billion gallons of ash sludge and counting). But the third item is the most interesting.
It wasn't too long ago that Hansen was equivocating on the wisdom of building more nuclear power plants, a technology that, while producing very low levels of greenhouse gases, tends to get the hackles up of many an environmentalist for a long list of reasons. He used to demur when pressed, admitting it was outside his field of expertise. But he appears to have done some research, and this letter to the president now contains a clear call for a "Urgent R&D on 4th-generation nuclear power."
I've been even more skeptical of the potential of nuclear power to play a significant role in the transition to clean energy. For one thing, uranium isn't renewable. Second, it's hideously expensive. Third, we haven't solved the (largely political, but nevertheless real) problem of what to do with the waste. And fourth, there's the proliferation argument. But I have to admit that Hansen is probably on to something here.
What he's not talking about is more of the same. Nor is he calling for rapid deployment of unproven technology, as this "4th-generation" stuff has a way to go before it's ready for commercialization. But he does want this country (and, importantly, the rest of the world) to invest in a new approach to burning radioactive isotopes, one that avoids the waste issue, and effectively shelves the renewable issue for the foreseeable future. We still have money and weaponization to deal with, but given the threat posed by climate change, that seems a like fair swap.
Existing nuclear reactors use less than 1% of the energy in uranium, leaving more than 99% in long-lived nuclear waste. 4th GNP can "burn" that waste, leaving a small volume of waste with a half-life of decades rather than thousands of years. Thus 4th GNP could help solve the nuclear waste problem, which must be dealt with in any case. Because of this, a portion of the $25B that has been collected from utilities to deal with nuclear waste justifiably could be used to develop 4th generation reactors.
The principal issue with nuclear power, and other energy sources, is cost. Thus an R&D objective must be a modularized reactor design that is cost competitive with coal. Without such capability, it may be difficult to wean China and India from coal. But all developing countries have great incentives for clean energy and stable climate, and they will welcome technical cooperation aimed at rapid development of a reproducible safe nuclear reactor.
Among the most intriguing candidates for this fourth generation of nukes is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. The problem is, as mentioned, no one's actually built one yet. When the first conventional reactors were being constructed, society was promised not only clean, but very very cheap, electricity. So we can be excused for retaining for skepticism. There's also the fast breeder option, although that particular technology has proven quite problematic so far.
But again, Hansen isn't saying we should build such things now, just fund some research. And fast. It's hard to argue with that. But I will take issue with one portion of Hansen's letter. Applying the same reasoning to carbon capture and sequestration, he writes that
because of the enormous number of dirty coal-fired power plants in existence, the abundance of the fuel, and the fact that CCS technology could be used at biofuel-fired power plants to draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide, the technology deserves strong R&D support.
While it is undeniable that a world full of coal and coal-fired power plants will find it difficult to kick the coal habit, it seems to me that the environmental, logistical and technological challenges involved with making coal clean dwarf those associated with safe and affordable nuclear power. And no matter how you treat the emissions from coal, you still have big problems at the beginning and end of the process. First, you have to mine the stuff, an activity that tends to destroy entire ecosystems. Then, after you're finished burning it, you have to do something with the ash. No amount of CCS research will change those facts.
So sure, let's see if we can make the thorium thing work. Shutting down all the world's coal-fired plants by 2030 may not be possible without such technology. But for my tax dollars, CCS doesn't make the same grade.
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That's been my (very layman's) understanding of nuclear power as well -- that as long as the material is still highly radioactive (and such a hazard to store), it's still perfectly usable as fuel... we just want to avoid creating the the easily-weaponized stuff, and that's the reason for the whole storage mess.
Anyone have any more in-depth evaluation of how close to reality those solutions are? I know this is also an active question here in France, where the vast majority of our electricity is already nuclear.
The source of your link regarding the liquid fluoride thorium reactor is thoroughly tendentious and - at best - poorly suited as an introduction to the topic. Can you cite an overview of this hypothetical technology which is not at the same time a sales pitch for same, saturated with anti-environmentalist sneers?
Point taken. Done. --jh
I don't really see how proliferation is a problem anyway. The countries that most need nuclear power to reduce emissions are places like the US, China, and India. They already have nuclear weapons, and frankly their producing more would not be difficult even without those types of reactors being constructed.
As for other countries like Iran using reactors to proliferate, that probably can't be stopped anyway and in any case doesn't affect where the uranium goes in an American or Indian reactor.
Did it ever occur to you that YOU just may be one of the forces of ignorance? Can you do one single post without trying to be offensive? These are simple honest questions.
@RED,
So do you have a substantive criticism of the content of the article or are is everyone here going to get more vague bellyaching?
I can see that any solution is better than carrying on as we are, but the cost of researching new nukes will crowd out the real solutions available now.
Energy efficiency, etc. will cut carbon emissions and get people working (check out the Dec issue of Mother Jones for some numbers on what we would get for our investment). Handing yet more cash to the nuclear industry for some sort of possible pay-off years down the line (a continuing yet largely empty promise) is less than enticing. 'Affordable nuclear power' - surely an oxymoron?
RED is much too thin-skinned. One single sentence mentioning Roger Pelke Jr. (in a factual manner) out of the entire otherwise well written piece hardly qualifies as a source of ignorance. RED, the answer to your first question is certainly no, and yet you claim it is an honest simple question? It is not! It's a crude, poorly disguised insult.
I am glad to hear that this thorium stuff might get seriously considered. I'm tired of thorium reactor lovers beating us over the heard with it's wonderful potential. Maybe with new research, the question can be settled.
Thanks for thought-provoking article.
Your reservations about "clean coal," especially the environmental concerns associated with mining are well taken.
I'd like to disagree, however, with some of your reservations about existing nuclear technology. First, although uranium is not by definition "renewable," reprocessing will make the known reserves last for centuries even if no more is found. Thorium will make an even larger contribution to the fuel supply.
Second, uranium isn't "hideously expensive." Nuclear reactors are now producing electricity at near the lowest cost per kilowatt-hour of any of the competing technologies (even those with zero fuel costs like wind and solar), and the cost certainly includes the price of uranium fuel.
There are proposals for the storage of spent reactor fuel that eliminate most of the difficulties. The Health Physics Society has proposed (http://hps.org/documents/managing_spent_fuel_ps022-1.pdf) storage for several hundred years to allow about 99% of the dangerous isotopes to decay and then to reprocess the material with much less difficulty than is now the case. We are certainly capable of building structures that can last for 300 years. (The HPS is the professional society of radiation safety officials. I am not associated with it.)
Biologists and conservationists today are faced with a serious dilemma. They are certain that the use of fossil fuels is leading toward a global catastrophe; but at the same time they are increasingly aware that many types of renewable energy, because of the large amount of land that they require, will have a seriously detrimental impact on the natural world. Nuclear energy has a smaller impact on biological diversity than wind, solar, or biomass; in some cases, orders of magnitude smaller. In the debate over energy production, impact on the environment is a primary concern. From the biologist's or conservationist's viewpoint, the environment in addition to being a resource base for human development, is an object of wonder and source of learning through science, and it thereby acquires value that is independent of economic or material considerations.
The MIT Technology Review article you link to isn't about liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, but rather about Thorium Power's plans to develop Thorium mixed-oxide fuel assemblies for use in existing light-water reactors. The idea is to take plutonium from dismantled nuclear bombs and use it in high-burnup fuel that breeds U-233 from Th-232. It's an intriguing idea, and thanks to Russian help Thorium Power has a decent chance of actually qualifying their fuel. But thorium MOX assemblies are really a deproliferation tool--a means of destroying existing weapons materials. They lack most of the positive attributes of the liquid-fluoride reactor concept.
Pierce R. Butler:
I'm curious as to what you regard as particularly "tendentious" about Energy From Thorium, or what "anti-environmentalist sneers" it is saturated with. I know that Charles Barton is inclined to be mercilessly critical of opponents of nuclear power, and very skeptical of renewable energy, but I think he's really a pro-nuclear environmentalist at heart. He just doesn't agree with many things that are taken for granted in the mainstream environmentalism, and doesn't mince words while saying so. ORNL operated two molten-salt reactors back in the 1960s, so the technology is not really "hypothetical." It's some way from commercialization, but the concept has extraordinary potential, which is why Hansen is enthusiastic.
As for another source on molten-salt reactor technology, is this conference paper from the 2004 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants acceptable?
Hello Mr. Hrynyshyn,
Thank you for your interest and mention of the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor concept. I will readily admit that my blog (thoriumenergy.blogspot.com) is in an advocacy position for LFTR technology, I think that one will find that this technology has a lot to recommend it.
If one is concerned with nuclear safety, then one will be pleased to discover that LFTRs can be built with exceptional inherent safety from accidents that would destroy most other reactor types.
If one is concerned about proliferation, then one will be pleased to find that nature has given us a very nice anti-proliferation feature built into the thorium fuel that had discouraged the use of thorium (and U233) for weapons since the Manhattan Project.
If one is concerned about waste, then you will find that one can build a LFTR to produce essentially no long-lived transuranic waste, only relatively short-lived fission product "waste", much of which can be beneficially used after achieving stability.
If one is concerned about cost, then the low operating pressure, inherent safety, high-efficiency, and compact nature of a well-designed LFTR will be appealing.
Nonetheless, like any other nuclear technology, the government holds the trump card in all this development. Without their blessing, no private company will fund development. This is because the regulatory nature of the NRC makes eventual licensing and its costs highly uncertain. This is one of the reasons that Dr. Hansen is asking the President to push and push hard on this, because we need this technology as soon as possible.
A liquid thorium fluoride reactor (LFTR) uses Thorium as its primary fuel in liquid form (ThF4). Since the fuel is in liquid form and already fluorinated it is in a convient form for chemical processing to remove fission products.
Lets look at the output for a typical reactor generating 1 GWatt-electric for a year.
Once started an LFTR reactor consumes around 1,000 kg of Thorium per year (along with some water). The waste is the fission products (roughly 1,000kg).
Current generation nuclear power plants generate around 250 kg of transuranics (TRUs). These (Np, Pu, Am, and Cm) are the components of spent nuclear fuel that generate most of the concern over waste. An LFTR can be started using the TRUs from spent nuclear fuel from current nuclear reactors.
A fleet of LFTRs can completely consume these wastes from the existing spent nuclear fuel. A small amount (0.08kg) of TRU's will "leak" into the waste stream so the process isn't perfect. But we have dramatically reduced the waste problem so that in the end, even with the largest nuclear energy deployment one could imagine, we will have less TRU waste than we currently have.
I wrote a LFTR presentation for the general public. Please visit it.
James H - thanks for the added link, though Sovietologist's critique seems quite appropriate. The best that the MIT TR piece has to say about the specific technology discussed is that "it produces waste that's less toxic." (Insert sarcastic comparison of, say, Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle, here.)
Sovietologist - thanks for the link to that 2004 paper, though I don't expect to have time to read it right away.
Read Barton's comparison of environmentalists to Schopenhauer on the main page of his blog if you want to see why I describe him as sneering. From his photo, he looks like a nice guy; from his words, he comes across as an even more pretentious version of Charles Krauthammer.
IF liquid-fluoride thorium reactors can be operated economically with a high degree of safety and produce negative radioactive waste, I may be forced to reconsider my reflexive anti-nuke position - but the claims as presented so far strike me as having even less credibility than the industry which emits them.
Yes, there are problems worse than global warming. Ask yourself what we would think today if we were compelled to quarantine and attempt to clean large sections of waste-contaminated land, water, biota, etc at never-ending expense, and knew it was all due to Nefertiti's blow-dryer...
A quick skim of the 2004 PDF file from Sovietologist's link serves mostly to remind me how out of touch I am with that sort of tech-talk these days. Am I mistaken in suspecting that a molten-salt reactor means something akin to a liquid-sodium unit, and that the fuel cycles are repackaged versions of our old friend, the breeder reactor?
If so, and recalling the glowing promises that were made about these technologies decades ago (and their dismal and dangerous physical realizations), I see little choice but to take the whole proposal with multiple kilotons of solid-phase NaCl.
Now, about those high-efficiency PV cells and LED lightbulbs...
No, a fluoride-salt-based reactor is chemically the most opposite thing from a metallic-sodium-cooled reactor that there could be. Whereas metallic sodium will chemically react (violently) with nearly anything that contains oxygen (air, water, etc.) fluoride salts are totally chemically stable and won't react with anything, because the fluoride chemical form is more stable than any other.
The sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor is also totally different neutronically than a fluoride reactor. Neutrons from fission are "born" fast, then slow down through collisions with moderator material. Fluoride reactors are generally thermal-spectrum (like most reactors worldwide). Fast reactors try not to slow the neutrons down, but keep them fast to optimize other reactor parameters. The tremendous advantage of a thermal reactor is that is much easier to control for a long list of reasons I don't have time to detail here.
"Am I mistaken in suspecting that a molten-salt reactor means something akin to a liquid-sodium unit, and that the fuel cycles are repackaged versions of our old friend, the breeder reactor?"
Yes, they are different in many aspects.
For more background, there was a recent Google tech talk on the subject here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
Kirk Sorensen & Mark Strauch - thanks for the clarifications!
Robert Hargraves: Your pro-LFTR page is indeed well-written in terms of its target audience, and more persuasive than the link first provided by our host. However, your claims about the low cost of power from LFTR are undermined by the fact that this technology hasn't even reached deployment stage - and that in turn undermines the credibility of all your other claims.
Who in the WORLD would name their kid " Pierce Butler" ? hahahahahahahhha. just use your imagination people. I'm sure he (or she?) is a normal adjusted child and had to earn his or her way in the world on his or her own..........................lol
Pierce R. Butler My criticism of environmentalist has nothing to do with sound environmental policies and technologies which I support. It has to do with the tendency of some environmethalists to set up shibboleths that are really detrimental to the environment and the well being of future human inhabitants of the earth. I am certainly not critical of environmentalists who are willing to talk rationally about nuclear power. What i object to is the environmentalists who simply raise one objection after another to nuclear power without ever thinking through the points that advocates make. I further object to the hyping of renewables, without an honest assessment of their limitations and costs, I am very much a thinking environmentalists, an environmentalist who believes that it is possible for the world to be a well cared for home for the human species for a long time to come. I also believe that the goals of environmentalism are whooly consistent with human prosperity, and that increasing the wealth and energy resources of society makes it far easier to realize environmental goals. Poverty leads to far more environmental destruction than wealth does.
I've spent my WHOLE LIFE cleaning up the environment - more effort blood sweat and tears in that endeavor (with huge REAL results btw) than James the enviro whacko greeny or Pierce Brosnan Butler Dweeb Junior the third will ever be able to comprehend. I am a crusader for the real environment. I so HATE and REGRET stupid liberal bloggertype enviro eco greeny weenies. It's just SO stupid and ineffective and a waste of hot air. Get a life people. Stop wasting words and time. Get real with your cause. Lose the liberal stupid stuff. If you have to blog and advertise your position for political or monetary gain - you're probably part of the problem.