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Comment by Sukotto | Hacker News Reader

I think we're making a serious PR mistake calling these "Thorium Reactors" even though the term is accurate.

"Reactor" evokes "Nuclear Reactor". For many people, "nuclear reactor" is a deeply loaded term. Likewise "Thorium" (and other words that end in "-ium") sounds dangerously like "plutonium" and "uranium".

It doesn't matter how much better/safer this technology is. Don't expect the public to respond positively when we use those words. There's too much knee jerk, "no nukes!" baggage.

We should start calling these "salt power stations" or something else accurate, yet non-threatening. Otherwise, IMHO, it will be a steep uphill battle getting public and legislative support for building these things, regardless of their many benefits.

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A bunch of people have tried to rebrand our most energy-dense fuels (uranium and thorium). "Terrestrial Energy" comes to mind. And the unofficial Thorium PR lead, Kirk Sorensen, rebranded the Thorium-Molten Salt Reactor (T-MSR) as the LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) because "lifter" sounds better. As an engineer I'm a stickler on accurate naming so this suggestion bothers me, and I think the opposing forces will easily be able to point out that it's just a rebranding of advanced nuclear reactors and hurt proponents' credibility. I wish we could just teach people to weigh risks of things like nuclear reactors versus their real benefits (clean air that has saved 1.8 million people already, 24/7 reliability, tiny land/fuel/waste/transportation footprints, etc.) but on the other hand people are more emotional than not. I'm sure you're right that a sweet new name on a nuclear reactor would be a help.

Honestly I consider focus on Thorium fuel itself to be an attempt to rebrand the much broader but equally capable advanced nuclear industry.

Unfortunately regardless of what you wish, people do not weigh the risks. They have knee jerk reactions to terms like 'nuclear reactor'. It's human nature and shouldn't be ignored. Is it more important that it have an accurate name or that it's accepted by the public?

Definitely the latter. I just hope to find other ways to influence people's feelings about things like nuclear reactors. If some epic rebranding is what it takes, then that's great. I feel that it will take more than that.

Any such rebranding would probably last about as long as it takes people to learn that the facilities are built by nuclear contractors, regulated by the NRC, and employing nuclear operators.

More importantly: any such rebranding would ignore how we got into the current predicament to begin with...

Oil, gas, and coal companies have known about climate change for decades, and it represents a threat to untold megabillions worth of profits and business. It is no coincidence they have been pushing anti-nuclear FUD, sponsoring hack research, pushing "green" blogs, NIMBY campaigns, and such for decades. Coordinated, professional, smear campaigns masquerading as environmental issues.

Leaked presentations and marketing materials have shown those companies have triangulated the issue quite simply: They cannot win on facts. They cannot convince everyone to keep fossil fueling it up on the merits of their argument. They can, however, cause enough confusion and knee-jerking to keep the "debate" about climate change open to paralyze political action. They have also pushed pie-in-the-sky green solutions which are superficially satisfying but fundamentally entrench their interests until we're past the point of no return. Push the starting line so far forward that we just have to give up.

That the "environmentalists" on the left have spent 20+ years pushing the strategic interests of Big Coal and Big Oil using their resources and bad science is the result of willful manipulation. That manipulation is a response to the threat of atomic energy and climate change legislation in light of our global infrastructure cycles.

That is to say: if you call fission "grandmas apple pie" it will be a very short time before we're all convinced that grandmas apple pie is dangerous, impractical, too expensive, poorly thought out, not scalable, not feasible, and impossible to do right. Forget what the stats say. Do not look at Ontario. Pretend France is not real. There will be blogs. There will be glossy signs. There will be "grassroots activism", tweet campaigns, and coordinated messaging about Big Grandma and the cancerous properties of Pie. The anti-GMO people will now be anti-grandma, too.

We are playing a game against well-connected oligopolists... We only get to win if we win. They get to win if they win, or if the clock runs out. So guess what the strategy is?

It's all quite baffling, because they could instead of invested some of those megabillions in extending their reach into low-carbon energy sources, embracing the new world and continuing to exist.

The thing is, the reason they have those megabillions and continue to make money is the institutional knowledge they have of how to run a mature business in the industry they're in. Parts of that will translate over to nuclear power or whatever comes next, but for a very significant chunk of it, they're competing with every other business in the new industry, many of which will have a lot less baggage - which is incredibly risky.

You're not really proposing "acceptance by the public". You're proposing to spin the euphemism treadmill to gain some temporary ignorance by the uninformed. Until some negative event hits the news again and everyone will once again associate them with that.

I think honesty will get you much further. Instead of making bold promises that everyone has heard before ("these are fail-safe", "unsinkable" etc.) just point at the radioactive dust emitted by coal plants instead. Or open pit mining for coal. Or CO2 emissions. Don't claim to be perfect, just better than the competition.

The problem is they need huge subsides to cover the risks, and even then it costs more than other clean alternatives. How much solar/wind + pumped hydro can you buy just from the costs associated with Fukushima Daiichi cleanup / evacuation etc?

Even coal which has long been the cheapest but dirty option is having trouble competing.

> Even coal which has long been the cheapest but dirty option is having trouble competing.

*with $2 Natural Gas

The solar/wind $23/MWh production tax credit is not really something that's easy for anyone to compete with, except natural gas. [1]

You're right that nuclear needs to get its costs down, especially to play in the west. We know it can be done because the French electrified nearly their entire grid with nukes in 10 years for reasonable costs, and the Koreans, bless their hearts, have been building Gen III plants at very reasonable prices. (Alas! their new president is riding an anti-nuclear platform.) With the recent Toshiba/Westinghouse issues regarding the US AP1000 plants, it's pretty unlikely to see any big new nukes anytime soon. But the world moves on and China is building lots of nukes.

Fukushima will be really expensive. Building tornado-hardened designs in tsunami zones does not pay off, so we should not do that. But building appropriately hardened designs is a pretty solid non-emitting solution. Nukes produce 65% of the carbon-free electricity in the USA right now; they're already our climate champions.

[1] https://energy.gov/savings/renewable-electricity-production-...

> Building tornado-hardened designs in tsunami zones does not pay off

The big issues are keeping our construction, engineering, and regulatory agencies active with the subject material and with industry, and allowing saner reactor technologies into commercial use.

Fukishima was not far off from surviving that catastrophe as was. More robust training for emergency response would have avoided them pumping the water the wrong way, and something as simple as raising their backup generator a few meters off the ground would have done the trick.

More vitally, pushing techs into commercial production like thorium-salt reactors (among many others!), would provide failure modes that are INSANELY better than what we get from light water reactors. It's just about the most insane thing to do with radioactive power sources... surround them with something under pressure that violently expands and tries to go right to the atmosphere...

I think the tsunami zones should be fine for reactors, we just need to start with reactor designs that will thrive in failure. Your molten salts turning into rock and keeping themselves contained during a breach or flood, for example, is something that's highly amenable to disaster planning.

All that needed to be done was house the emergency generators in a tsunami-proof building.

Even then, there was time to bring in backup generators, and they were brought - but idiotically the connectors were wrong and they couldn't be connected in time.

I think it is important to understand why Westinghouse went bankrupt though. And that's because they didn't (couldn't) use of the biggest breakthroughs of the 20th century: mass production.

> Nukes produce 65% of the carbon-free electricity in the USA right now; they're already our climate champions.

And this is the reason I fight tooth and nail for it. If we're to meet our emission goals for 2050, we have to build more nuclear. A diversified portfolio of energy sources is key.

Reactor -> plant

One of the major problems is we were told our current reactors would provide safe and environmentally fuel. The trouble is it's not as clean as most people think.

Mining Uranium ore does have a significant environmental impact. There have been leaks at plants; trace amounts of tritium has been found around breeder reactors like Watts Bar (and TVA has bought up more and more of the land around the area).

The waste, currently held on site at most plants, is another big issue. Engineers will tell you it's depleted and encased in half a meter of concrete that won't break down for tens of thousands of years. Some of these containers are already leaking. There have been several recent controversies recently on the Yukka Mountain facility.

While newer reactors may not have these problems, the fact is there are problems we weren't aware up that cropped up from our traditional Boiling/Pressurized Water Reactors that companies will not fess up to. That's why people are apprehensive.

I don't think that will go away unless someone discovered how to make Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENRs) viable .. which would also involve understanding how/why they world, and getting them to work consistently (which no one has).

I'm going to start off saying we NEED Yucca Mountain, BUT you seem to think this stuff is more dangerous than it is. Myself and many others that work with these technologies aren't actually happy about the new John Oliver episode.

> Mining Uranium ore does have a significant environmental impact.

I'm glad you bring that up. To actually understand how much of an impact we need to compare it to things. The human mind isn't good at putting into perspective raw numbers when they are that large, it's just "a lot". When you include the mining of both solar and uranium plants, you actually get around the same total environmental impact. I make this comparison because I've never heard anyone complain about the switch to solar. When we compare to coal mining, fracking, or oil drilling, uranium is tiny. Or even comparing to computers and cell phones.

> The waste, currently held on site at most plants, is another big issue.

I carry a vial of tritium around in my pocket? Why? Because it glows and is a fun conversation. I have no worry about it irradiating my junk because it is a beta emitter that has low penetrating power (~6mm of air). The danger of tritium is soft tissue. So just don't drink it or rub it in your eyes. Granted a leak is more worrisome, but its danger is nowhere near that of the heavy elements. There will always be some waste, but nuclear has done a pretty good job compared to other energy sources because of the fear. Some fear is healthy, especially with this tech. But, again, we NEED Yucca Mountain. There's not much waste, but we should put it in the proper place.

> While newer reactors may not have these problems, the fact is there are problems we weren't aware up that cropped up...

You're discussing concerns about decades old technologies. Remember, that was the same era we were arguing over lead in gasoline, asbestos, and aerosols. Sure, we have problems today, but it isn't the same magnitude. No one in their right mind would shoot a nuclear waste container, or even put it in that small of a container anymore. Things have really changed in the last 50 years, and nuclear tech has been progressing in that time too.

>I don't think that will go away unless someone discovered how to make Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENRs) viable

Call it what it is, cold fusion. I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. But ITER and other fusion facilities are showing promising results. But fusion is not just a different ballpark from fission, it is a completely different game (energy and safety).

> concerns about decades old technologies. Remember [...] Things have really changed in the last 50 years

A cautionary tale about this flavor of argument.

I saw a panel of Boston city planners. They complained about still getting grief for the "original sin" (their phrase) of some really bad decision making (like Boston City Hall) in the 1960's and 70's. It was half a century ago they said. We're not like that anymore they said. They seemed quite miffed about it.

Then they later mentioned Boston's recent Big Dig, and some of its impacts. And the description was surprisingly distorted. Not even a defensive "none of the failure was our fault!", though that was implicit. But more, almost an obliviousness towards causality. And certainly no recognition that their brief description of their field's "no longer relevant" 1960's flaws, seemed to overlap quite a bit with failure postmortems of the Big Dig.

This combination of arguments was remarkably effective in trashing their perceived credibility.

It was widely considered a good move to rename "nuclear magnetic resonance" to "magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)" to avoid patient fears. That said, the "nuclear" in that case really was being misinterpreted by the public to refer to fission/fusion, unlike molten salt reactors where the name is being interpreted accurately, at least in a formal sense.

Unfortunately Thorium reactors were/would be full on nuclear reactors with the usual problems that come with those regardless of what you call them. Although the one that was built only operated from 1965-1969, "Sampling in 1994 revealed concentrations of uranium that created a potential for a nuclear criticality accident" and they had to spend many millions sorting that out.

Can you describe what problems these Thorium-burning MSRs have that plague current commercial reactors?

There's kind of a list here https://whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html

"Green coal power systems" keep everyone happy.

The OECD periodically studies trends in public opinion regarding the use of nuclear power. Their most recent study is from 2010, and its conclusions largely refute any cynicism you may hold regarding public understanding of nuclear energy.

From the executive summary:

"In 6 out of 7 of the countries considered, public opinion has been growing more supportive of nuclear energy in the energy mix. The data show that countries where nuclear energy is already present have populations that are generally much more supportive of its use. They also show that these publics are generally better informed and more knowledgeable on nuclear issues and there is a clear positive correlation between knowledge and support."

(https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2010/6859-public-attitudes...)

That was pre Fukushima

Are you suggesting that thorium molten salt reactors get their energy from a source other than nuclear fission?

No. I'm saying that how you name things matters.

One of the ways it matters is that giving something an overly euphemistic name leads people to wonder exactly what it is that you're hiding.

I think nuclear power could follow other products like Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI) and just drop the word Nuclear (MRI). How about fission power or fusion power, depending on the source?

Since we're talking about rocks, and heat, I kinda wonder if "geothermal" might be a viable misnomer.

Fusion is fine for now, but "fission" has already been chicken-littled :/

In the earth sciences the term radioactive dating has been replaced with radioisotopic dating. Maybe isotopic power? Or just wait till the generation that grew up with "duck and cover" drills at school to be out of power. Not very long now.

At least this way you convince the educated public that you are credible.

We should avoid names inspired by what amounts to political correctness, because people who see through the names may distrust us further.

However, I do appreciate your point, and I agree that it is a problem. I think the attitude, at least from young white collar professionals, is warming up to nuclear.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance was the original name for the imaging technique we call MRI. Patients were scared so they changed the name.

For years I've been confused by the two different names. That was an insightful comment.

It's also important to note nuclear refers to the atomic nucleus and not a nuclear reaction.

Nucleus fission/fusion is what constitutes a nuclear reaction, so they in fact refer to exactly same thing involved in entirely different processes. But yeah you'd have to explain it every time it is mentioned.

You might be swayed by facts. But that makes you one of the minority.

A LOT of people make decisions based on emotion. Then they cherry pick the facts (if any) that support the choice, and disregard the facts that oppose.

This is true. However, I think logical people as a group hold a disproportionate amount of power in society. I'm not sure, though, and I'm only arguing out of, well, logic.

What I mean to say is if I were a politician, I would be more concerned with aligning myself with other politicians, scientists, and policy makers, than my constituents in the initial term. Those who are non-technical may be won over later and with other means.

This is why you won't make it as a politician, sadly.

You need initial popular buy-in to be elected, which is why populist policies will always do well.

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