Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang
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He shouldn’t be expected to be an expert in the nuances of the technology or fuels. This should always be left to the appropriate experts in the Dept of Energy, etc. The job of the president should be to identify the problem (in this case climate change), and task the appropriate agencies with solving it, which will involve a variety of actions.
In my opinion the analysis linked to from HN is laughably flawed. It's not exactly wrong, but it's so terse and reductive that it might as well be. For example— while the waste from the thorium fuel cycle could be used to make weapons, but the fuel would always include some Uranium 232 (a gamma emitter) and therefore it's more difficult to handle safely and your entire weapon manufacturing pipeline is able to be monitored from afar by foreign governments.
Careful about downplaying the U-233 weapons potential. Phenomenal nuclear weapons can be derived from Thorium. Here's a good declassified hint from 1966: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/79078
Unfortunately, politics is not rational. Energy sources that kill slowly but gradually make less news and attention than "death spike" patterns even if their long-term-average numbers are better. If you don't address political patterns, then you will be bulldozed by trolls and demagogues who leverage emotion and vague impressions. If you go on the news with death-rate charts, you'll be ridiculed by the same people who beat up and shunned nerds in school. I'm just the messenger.
If it turns out that there are no serious side effects or risk and governments agree to do it, we have solved climate change.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/10/solar-geo...
You could cover the desert with aluminum foil I guess. Might confuse the birds.
Literally the only way to determine that would be to try it. And then let’s hope the proponents are correct, because if not...
There is just so much we don’t understand about the global climate to think this sort of solution is a good idea. I’ll start taking the geoengineering people seriously when they can accurately predict the weather one month from now.
Which indicates he's genuinely interested in solving problems. Politics and focus groups be damned. As such it seems likely he'd update his priors via field experts.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html
And then we have our most popular, the Thorium Myths page [2].
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
I love that Yang is bringing the discussion to the capabilities of nuclear technology even if I consider it a bit misguided to focus on the thorium fuel cycle. There's a phrase in nuclear advocacy today: "Come for the thorium, stay for the reactors"
We have amazing, safe, economical, etc. nuclear reactors. They're called nuclear reactors, and don't need any miracle tech conjured up in some magazine columnist's imagination.
We should just try to help people see context in the things they don't like about nuclear. The reactor accidents we all have heard about are hard for anyone to compare with 8 million air pollution deaths per year from combustion. But few people know about the Banqiao dam failure that killed 100,000.
I read recently that 60% of American's think nuclear reactors contribute to climate change, when in fact they're among the lowest carbon forms of energy known.
It's really mostly a PR issue. Nuclear PR money is tied up in utilities which also all run large fossil assets, so it's rare for them to talk about how low carbon nuclear is.
With airplanes, everyone knows they're really safe. Everyone says they're safer than cars. People are still afraid of airplanes but they're reassured. It'd be nice if nuclear fission could get to this level in the public zeitgeist.
Though true by many metrics, the fact that this has entered into the public zeitgeist is a victory in marketing.
While commercial air travel is much safer per hour and per KM, it is less safe by the metric used by the industry and its insurers: Deaths per journey.[1]
However, there's a strong argument to be made that time and distance are more relevant to the consumer anyways. Still, the per-journey metric could have been weaponized by an opponent of commercial air travel to assert the opposite.
[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16321985-200-flight-i...
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4a3e/c44df38873b8bf1e79a30e...
My dad sold microwaves when they were new; they were careful never to say "radiation" or "irradiated" or anything like that.
Not saying that's a good reason to swear ourselves off nuclear, but it's more complicated than low carbon emissions.
Radiological hazards are indeed pretty unique in the human experience. I disagree that any given release has unpredictable impact though. Top scientists around the world have studied the effects of radiation on living things and the environment in elaborate detail for 80 years. We have vast amounts of good data. This really became political around 1953 as the radioactive fallout from the big atmospheric thermonuclear weapons became extremely serious. The entire environmentalist movement itself was born out of protests against radiological hazards from weapons testing.
Where climate science has the IPCC, heath effects of radiation has UNSCEAR [1], a UN-organized international group of top scientists.
The number one argument for nuclear is that it dramatically reduces air pollution deaths by displacing fossil fuel. The carbon-free nature you mention is argument number 2 in my mind. Number 3 is that it can run 24/7 and be deployed in a wide variety of geographies.
As for polluting the ocean at Fukushima, I recommend seeing what Jim Conca has to say on it [2]. He's one of the world experts in nuclear waste.
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-reall...
Nuclear success stories are stories of standardization of design and repetition. Most of the boondoggles are first-of-a-kind or first-in-2-decades builds.
If one such failure amongst hundreds of reactors active for over fifty years is the price of saving millions every year, then so be it. We should use solar/wind/water to the full extent possible but not exclude nuclear energy, especially with the latest factor designs. And you can bet that Japan learned from Fukushima and that it's very unlikely that'll reoccur as well. Plus, most reactors aren't built near major fault lines, so this failure isn't even possible in most places. Let's not kill millions because of a TV drama. It's news exactly because it's rare, that's why you don't hear of people dying while installing roof solar or from air pollution.
Presumably that is going to be consistent with any large industrially planned operation though. The overruns aren't going to be technology-specific, they are going to be related to the tendering process.
If the planners are incentivised for accuracy there will be one, maybe two overrun projects then the assumptions get adjusted. So if it is routine that suggests that there is some sort of incentive problem.
An industry planner will have little difficulty estimating an accurate cost of the technical parts of a project. Using historic averages or model + 20% contingency usually gets most of the way there. If the estimates are consistently wrong there are political issues at play.
At 100 years your radioactivity is still dominated by fission products, which are the same in either reactor. At 100,000 years the radioactivity is minuscule with any reactor.
But what you don't have with thorium or fast uranium reactors is a lot of transuranic waste, like plutonium. That's the stuff that people think has to be contained for 10,000 years. With just fission products, you're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years. You do get a bit of very long-lived fission product but it's not much radioactivity.
Also, the total volume of waste is about 1% as much as with conventional reactors, since 99% of conventional waste is (mostly) U238, some leftover U235, and transuranics. A molten salt fast reactor will fission all of that very effectively, and a thorium reactor doesn't have the U238 or make as much transuranic in the first place.
* Uranium-Plutonium fuel in a closed cycle can burn all the transuranics and have very low radiotoxicity waste as well.
* Molten salt fuels are 10x less dense than typical solid fuels, implying an increase in waste volume. They're also water soluble and frequently liquid. This complicates waste disposal and transport. Not terribly, but still.
A good summary reference on radiotoxicity vs. reprocessing is: https://www.iaea.org/publications/8359/assessment-of-partiti...
Disposing of the waste from a once-through fuel cycle is totally doable. We just have to let the world know that the Finns are doing it at the Onkalo Repository, we can do it in WIPP, and Deep Isolation LLC is working on a pretty slick deep borehole option.
That doesn't necessarily imply anything about the waste volume. With high burnup, the waste is just fission products, which are entirely different elements than the fuel.
One reason high burnup is easier in MSRs is that xenon, a neutron poison, is a gas that just bubbles out of the liquid fuel, instead of being trapped in a solid. With fast uranium or thermal thorium, you also don't have a large amount fuel that can't be fissioned. (Some early MSRs will be thermal uranium, and produce more waste.)
For disposal of fission products, the general idea is to mix them into glass and bury them as solid blocks.
Meh, that might be a bit of an overstatement. Yes, plutonium-driven fast reactors have a delayed neutron fraction around 0.0035 down from 0.0065 in a U-235-fueled fast reactor. The relatively large delayed neutron fraction from fast fissions of U-238 helps out along the way. You can reduce the radiotoxicity of TRU even if you continue to load some U-238. The inert matrix fuels with no U-238 at all get more interesting from this perspective (also from the Doppler effect), but most people don't envision using these.
In fluid systems, more than half of the fuel inventory is off in a heat exchanger out of the core, which means the delayed neutron fraction is cut roughly in half in those systems too (the delayed neutron precursor decays happen where neutron importance is near zero).
Plutonium-fueled fast reactors can be operated with good margins of stability.
At least the US DOE is already highly knowledgeable about thorium and molten salt reactors. Advanced reactor people at the national labs and elsewhere have been studying this stuff for decades. There are still plenty of us who know the details.
Particularly since any of the other people who pretend to care about the climate haven't revised their weird "no nuclear" policy despite it all.
Also, the answers lack nuance. E.g. proliferation risk is present through U233, however, U233 seems very difficult to deal with in bombmaking. So at least it's less of a problem maybe.
But in all, you are right, I think. And maybe even more than right.
I'm a reactor designer and study this kind of thing. It's really just a question of how fast you move your Th-232 through a neutron cloud. If you move it relatively quickly and then do your Pa separation you can get very nice U-233 from Thorium.
The nice thing here about low-pressure fluid fuel reactors is that you can move material in and out fairly readily.
Heh. I've been whining that HBO hasn't made a miniseries about the 4 million outdoor air pollution deaths every year or the other 4 million indoor air pollution deaths per year.
Worldwide, around 50 to 500 people die in planes each year.
Worldwide, over 1 million people die in cars each year.
People are also concerned about nuclear reactor safety. I live about 6 km from a nuclear reactor and there are repeated calls to dismantle it. I frequently get visits from PR people from the power company to try to convince me that the nuclear reactor is necessary. It's a short conversation: I'm very much more inclined to welcome the nuclear power plant than more natural gas! However, this particular power plant has been closed down for almost 15 years. Note this is significantly longer than the time period since the Tohoku earthquake. To be frank, the power company was not able to pass safety checks for years prior to the tsunami. Although it has been significantly upgraded, I'm not surprised that people in the area are afraid.
Even with this, I can tell you that the land literally next door to the power plant is significantly higher priced than the land next to one of the nicest stretches of white sand beach in this part of Japan. People here have a pretty good handle on what's more dangerous.
I wish nuclear apologists with an agenda would stop repeating this.
250,000 residents were displaced, many spending their final days in gyms and other camps as rufugees in their own country.
An entire army will spend decades and likely trillions of dollars trying to do something with the shattered remains of the Fukushima complex.
For which overreaction to the powerplant failure is partially to blame.
The disaster that hit Fukushima was a tsunami. Only a very small section of the prefecture is still affected by the fallout and most of that area is for an abundance of caution. Most of the leaked radioactive material went in the best possible place for it—dispersed into ocean water. Ocean water already contains naturally occurring radioactive material, in quantities many orders of magnitude greater than humans could ever hope to disperse "by accident".
Meanwhile, the disaster being faced now could have been similar or ever massively worse if the tsunami had hit and damaged chemical storage plants instead.
Also, you are making an error in how you calculate risk. It's not just how many fatalities are caused by each source of risk on an annual basis. It's also how much potential a risk-source has to scale. Nuclear can potentially scale into causing a massive number of fatalities and that is why people, correctly, identify it as a serious source of risk.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/japan-consider...
Thorium is more of a side-topic there.
On the economic side of whether thorium is cheaper, the submission argues in a very underhanded manner. Yes, fuel is cheap compared to building the plant in all cases. But the fuel cost of thorium is an order of magnitude below uranium due to no enrichment (for light water reactors in the fuel, for heavy water reactors of the water). And possibly (for liquid core reactors) the unnecessary fuel elements production.
This turns out not to be true in practice. Uranium-238 is fertile just like Thorium-232. To run a reactor off either of these fertile fuels requires breeder reactor technology, which involves chemical separations and exotic fluids. In practice, this has always been more expensive, even though the U-238 or Th-232 is not enriched. It turns out that breeder reactor infrastructure outweighs the cost reduction in not having to enrich.
In fact, this is the primary reason that we don't have any breeder reactors today: it's simply cheaper to mine and enrich uranium than to reprocess. There are political reasons as well, but the primary reason is this economics.
Right now, when we make nuclear weapons from plutonium 239 and uranium 235, it looks like a regular machinist doing regular machinist things on a lathe, except they're doing the work in a glove box. These elements, their contaminants, and their decay products all decay by alpha decay, which is blocked a thin layer of basically anything. As long as it doesn't physically get inside your body, (hence the glove box) it's safe.
Uranium 233 from the thorium cycle inevitably is contaminated by uranium 232. Uranium 232 decays quickly into thallium 208, which is a hard gamma emitter. It takes a lot of work to get uranium 233 pure enough to make nuclear weapons out of it. Bodies with the resources to deal with this are already sophisticated enough to enrich uranium 235: the uranium 233 angle is irreverent.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te...
Also the cost estimates of nuclear don't include decomissioning because nobody has actually decomissioned a nuclear power station yet so who knows how much it costs.
Decommissioning costs can be considered once the planet is carbon neutral, which it is not right now. Right now the goal is to build up carbon-free energy generation. That said, if you ask the right people [1] they probably can give you an estimate.
[1] http://www.japc.co.jp/english/project/haishi/decommissioning...
It's not terribly hard to shut one down (or at least not much harder than your typical power plant) but extracting/releasing any radioactive material is very, very difficult.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/07/06...
I’m glad someone is talking about new possibilities of carbon free power generation.