Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins in Norway
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Except everyone who knows anything about it. Plutonium is a hot topic because it's what you need to build a nuke, but the public perception that it is a significant as nuclear waste is simply completely misguided.
Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you. It oxidizes easily, and it's oxides are heavy and non-soluble, so when it is released to the environment, it just tends to fall down and stay there. There is negligible biological uptake through eating, and while there is some uptake through breathing, plutonium does not tend to stay airborne.
Various people have denounced environmental plutonium as something capable of killing billions. The toxicity of plutonium in humans is not known, simply because not enough people have died of it. There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body (and that's a long and horrible story), and there were a lot of people who worked coated in plutonium dust for a long time. Of the people who were injected with plutonium, most died of other causes. Suffice to say, plutonium is sufficiently non-radioactive that it's chemical toxicity is considered significant in it's lethality. Or, in other words, it's fine to consider toxicity of environmental plutonium as you would consider lead or other heavy metals.
To put it short, plutonium being toxic is simply not a concern as far as nuclear waste is concerned. If all the plutonium produced by civilian nuclear power was pulverized and spread in populated areas, it would not make nuclear reactors as dangerous to people as wind power. (Somewhat ironically, because of the thorium that is released into the environment while separating the REE for the magnets.) Taking all the plutonium produced in a plant and dumping it in one spot doesn't make that spot as dangerous as the ground near a typical fuel station that was in use for the period leaded gas was used.
Nuclear waste is really bad, but that's because of short-lived isotopes, which decay more often, and thus are more radioactive, and light radioactive materials, which are often soluble in water, have high biological uptake, and can stay in the atmosphere.
Plutonium needs to be tracked really closely, but that is not because it's toxic, it's because it can be used to make a bomb.
The more you know.
What the fuck. The bit about Quaker is really nuts.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files for anyone who doesn't feel like googling it.
This - and not the plutonium - is the bad part. Your comment is completely irrelevant to argument the parent makes.
I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent, and I don't see how discussing a particularly egregious case of what was presented could possibly be "completely irrelevant".
Your comment reminds me old joke: "Doctor, you forgot about anaesthesia before surgical operation!" — "Don't worry, patient is mute.".
There are many kinds of development disabilities. It was not ever said anything about mental disabilities.
Everybody seems to agree that the whole experiment was unethical, but it seems unlikely that that the radiation harmed any of the subjects.
Do you happen to know if anything useful was learned from the experiment?
And suggesting that MIT students be used for radioactivity experiments is silly: they would eat their own radioactive stuff to screw with the scientists.
The "scientists" in question didn't think anyone would consent so they chose to experiment on people without seeking consent. They knew that normal adults would ask too many questions so they used cognitively impaired children. They did this because they didn't think of developmentally disabled people as fully human.
Look, MIT has already decided that this was a horribly unethical thing to do. Its professors practically scream that in classes. And it paid off the victims with $2million. MIT thinks this is unethical. So why are you disagreeing?
Using developmentally disabled children for research BECAUSE they can't consent is a horrendous breach of basic human rights and not once did I disagree with you that it was unethical. I appreciate your argument but so far I've only been going after your rhetoric, which could be a lot more informative since you claim you studied this case.
Perhaps I was unclear. I think they should have done the controlled experiment with university staff or students as subjects. If the experiment was really completely harmless, there's no reason not to. If they wanted to study the effects on growing children, they should have used ordinary schoolchildren whose parents consented.
As science, this was complete crap totally apart from the awful ethics. Many developmentally disabled people suffer from chromosomal abnormalities that lead to non-trivial physiological differences between them and the rest of the population, including metabolic and cardiac differences. That makes it extremely difficult to infer anything about effects on the general population from studies done on a small group of developmentally disabled people and that's why people with chromosomal abnormalities are often excluded from most research protocols. I think that you'd know all of this if you were familiar with science.
The glowing oatmeal seems mild
That doesn't answer the question at all. It kinda just assumes that the question isn't really interesting because of course MIT isn't like Auschwitz, even in the instance where it kinda is.
The latter happened here, not the former.
And hey, it's not like anyone even brought that up other than in defense of MIT, to dismiss the question "why would they do X and not Y".
Essentially, what you get injected in you whenever you go for a CT scan, except this was a far, far lower dose.
Stupid sensationalism.
A Banana
One of the highest amount of radioactivity in natural products.
And I highly doubt that there was no consent beforehand. Perhaps there was excessive legalese or the parents were not notified of the tracers, but that doesn't constitute the assumption that no consent was given.
The problem with plutonium is a properly designed military reactor can take the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices.
That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases, their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to even start an attempt.
If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build 50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.
South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.
North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet South Korea knows they won't use it...
Japan on the other hand, IS kinda paranoic, in the last elections a new party was formed, with a militaristic and nationalistic tone (including visiting WWII shrines and reacalling WWII as the good times), and they got expressive votes, also the current prime minister proposed heavily remilitarize Japan (to irritation of China, and both Koreas), including scratch the current constitution, and use a new one that follow confucionism (instead of illuminism).
No. They have nukes because they have no chance whatsoever against the South. The North Korean army is bigger, but its equipment is antiquated, and it has no gas or live ammunition for training. The "soldiers" spend most of their time farming or working in factories. They don't have enough food to fight a war.
The South Korean military budget is 20x that of the North.
They might say that to their population, like they say that Kim Jung "Be Illing" shot a hole in one every time, but they don't really want the entire Korea, because they know they can never have the entire Korea.
It isn't that there aren't still dangerous secrets in the nuclear realm, but it's that the parts that are secret are more about how to make a really "good" bomb, or produce materially really efficiently. But the reality is that a group that doesn't really care about making good bombs or being particularly efficient isn't going to need as much secret knowledge as most people think.
To sum up, it really depends on what you mean by dangerous. They have nuclear weapons. That's pretty dangerous. But they don't have a large stockpile of well designed weapons, so no one is taking them too seriously and they're not what most people would consider a "nuclear power" because if they even tried to play with someone who was, they'd be so quickly outmatched they're extremely unlikely to do anything with them right now.
At least. So long as we live in an environment where if a nuclear bomb goes off, we're likely to know where it came from. The moment proliferation moves past that point is the moment we begin to have some real sticky issues and we are likely to have a problem.
In my mind, that's the scary scenario and it's why the world does a lot of work to limit the number of different parties that stores these types of weapons and has access to this type of technology.
Dig a tunnel under the DMZ and send people in to capture/assassinate the key people within the government.
Wow, you really believe that is the best way? Or is that the best way in the demented minds of the N. Korean leadership?
The problem isn't a stable country like Saudi having the bomb, the problem is triggering an arms race. If Iran gets the bomb then what does that mean for Lebanon? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Hezbollah? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Syria?
If Iraq had the bomb in the 80s what would that have meant for the Iran/Iraq war, or the first Gulf war? Saddam Hussein may have felt that nuking Kuwait as part of a scorched earth policy would've been valid. After all, he used chemical weapons against Iran (and his own people).
I can't speak for asia but in the middle east nuclear bombs change the balance of power substantially.
Assuming that there is a clear return address on any use of the weapon. How much time do you have to determine where to send the answering salvo? This argument made some kind of sense during the cold war, but it's dangerously naive if nearly everyone has a bomb and a long-range launch capability.
Thanks for an insightful post.
While procrastinating for an exam a while back, I decided to read up on the Chernobyl accident. It always remembered it as a horrible accident (which it was), significantly due to the errors involved, and the massive impact it had on the victims involved.
If I read your post correctly, it should not be attributed to plutonium. Would you mind elaborating on what kind of radioactive fumes/waste this could've been?
While the number of victims may be high, the number of casualties is impossible to determine: could range from 50s to 200,000s. In either case, I assume this is due to other radioactive waste (airborne?), or am I mistaken?
http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai...
I think the people operating complex systems are regularly making mistakes and then correcting them. When mistakes are recovered, the issue never becomes a problem, and there is no postmortem to come to our attention. It's only the cases where mistakes are made repeatedly over a long period, and the outcome is horrific, that the incident comes to our attention. It's a form of selection bias.
The corollary is that you must fix the holes as soon as you find them, so they won't all align in your path. And you do find the problems before a disaster, but people don't like to fix things.
That all said, there are exceptions. But pettiness and self-centeredness can so often wreck it, or at least deter people from being bold enough to face judgment or possible error in order to do the right thing.
Known, simple, redundant, and stable systems which tend to return to modes of stability, which don't tend to experience runaway failure modes, and whose staffs are trained in known (and unknown) failure modes, tend to work well.
Unknown designs (they or staff are new, they're poorly documented, they're acquired from vendors or through organizational acquisition, etc.), whose staff aren't trained in normal and abnormal operations, which do tend to go into runaway failure modes, whose safety or management systems themselves have (known or unknown) bugs, etc., all tend to compound failure modes.
I've had direct experience of this at several levels myself. More frighteningly, I've interviewed senior management of a nuclear facility who candidly admitted that it was poorly managed.
Realize that a 4GW nuclear power plant is producing about $360,000 worth of retail electricity ($0.09/kWh) per hour, and that downtime costs over a million dollars every three hours. Keeping that plant online and operational has a very high priority -- sometimes to the point of cutting corners to do so if short-term objectives may be met at the cost of long-term sustainability.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tech...
Anyone involved in systems design, or running systems, needs to read this book.
(I don't think this is a sufficient explanation, but I do think it's part of the explanation.)
Iodine-131 has strong uptake into the body, concentrates in the thyroid gland, and is highly radioactive. It is bad news.
Strontium-90 is well absorbed by humans, becomes locked in the bones, and has a half-life of decades. It is a significant long term problem.
Cesium-137 also has a decade-ish half-life and some body uptake. The main issue with it is that reactors produce large amounts. If it was a trace product it could be ignored.
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf
(Solar is fairly deadly too. Mostly installers falling from roofs.)
Nothing is going to be completely safe. It's valuable to get accidents and events as close to zero as possible, but I suspect that's being done by increasing the denominator rather than reducing the numerator.
In looking this up, I was struck by the avoidance of data that just says X people die annually by electrocution (of any kind), although I freely admit that perhaps my search terms were faulty. Maybe it was that time I was almost died by electrocution.
it's what you need [correct in original]
its half-life
it's only mildly radioactive [correct in original]
It's an alpha emitter [correct in original]
its oxides
its lethality
its *chemical toxicity*
it's fine [correct in original]
it's toxic, it's because [correct in original]"if inhaled or digested, however, plutonium's effects due to radioactivity overwhelm the effects of plutonium's chemical interactions with the body, and the LD50 dose drops to the order of 5ug/kg"
That basically makes it one of the most toxic substances that we know of.
> Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results, such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium.[91] "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."[96][97]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity
Not that I expect wikipedia to be very trustworthy on contentious issues, but still, the references do seem to lead to relatively non-political websites.
False. The "demon core" killed two people in two separate incidents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
... and it was not injected, as you'll see.
This article discusses none of that, and instead suggests that this reactor is sub-optimal because it's not a cold fusion reactor -- what? Thorium atoms are big and somewhat-unstable, which is what you want for fission. For fusion, you want little atoms you can ram together to make slightly-bigger little atoms. They're totally separate.
Its great to hear news that Thorium is finally on the path to adoption.
Also, isn't the neutron economy of LFTR just slightly above unity? IIRC chemical removal of fission byproducts was needed for a feasible Th reactor that generates excess U-233. At least that was my recollection that one of the potential advantages of the FLiBe design was for such very simple chemical reprocessing.
Some of the engineers involved in molten salt reactors say "come for the thorium, stay for the reactor." Liquid fuels offer several benefits. Removing fission products continuously helps you achieve high burnup. There's no fuel fabrication cost. And if the electricity cuts off, a frozen plug melts and all the fuel dumps into a passive cooling tank, with little worry about decay heat since you've been removing those fission products.
The neutron economy is arguably an advantage from a proliferation perspective, since you can't remove much fissile without the reactor shutting down.
Still, a good fast reactor like the IFR has its own charms. The metal fuel is easy to fabricate on-site, and they tested electricity cutoff and it quietly shut down just fine, due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. And the mixed plutonium isotopes produced by the reactor are very difficult to refine into weapons-grade.
One advantage of the molten salt reactor is that there's nothing in the reactor that can drive any kind of chemical explosion, like the hydrogen that blew at Fukushima. The IFR uses molten sodium, which is pretty reactive with air and water. That might not be too terrible to deal with but it does drive up the cost.
Another advantage of the IFR though is that we've got a production-ready design ready to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Reactor
[2] http://www.ife.no/en/ife/halden/hrp/the-halden-reactor-proje...
Hopefully enough to write an interesting story, though :)
I think you did a reasonable job, but the add-in about cold fusion didn't make any sense and really affected the seriousness of the article. It calls into question whether anything else in the piece is valid or not.
There are tons of people here that have expertise in these fields. Some of them are commenting on this very page. Why not develop relationships with people that can provide domain expertise as needed for stories like this, rather than trying to wing it?
(I do have quite a few expert friends who I lean on for domain expertise, but as luck would have it, my nuclear guy wasn't online when I wrote this.)
The news of "Thorium Reactors exist somewhere" is good enough to report on, and happy news indeed. :-)
Incidentally, this is the project site, which the article irritatingly doesn't bother to link: http://www.thorenergy.no/en.aspx
The first sample of Thorium was found in Norway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#History
Morten Thrane Esmark found a black mineral on Løvøya island, Norway and gave a sample to his father Jens Esmark, a noted mineralogist. The elder Esmark was not able to identify it and sent a sample to Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius for examination in 1828. Berzelius determined that it contained a new element, which he named thorium after Thor, the Norse god of thunder.[17] He published his findings in 1829.[50][51][52]
The fact that Thor Energy is Norwegian might just be due to the country being at the same time very wealthy and environment-minded. The Norwegian reserves of thorium are far smaller than those of other countries.
Norway is also only nr. 22 when it comes to proven oil reserves :) (dunno about previous figures)
From the (few, probably inaccurate) estimates, Norway seems to have a sizeable enough amount of thorium for a country of its size and population.
What is this supposed to mean? Who ever talked about cold fusion thorium reactor? Was the author thinking about toroidal fields in Tokamak (which is very hot fusion)??
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/156393-cold-fusion-reacto...
Let's see if this performs any better.
My main reason for commenting is to congratulate Thor Energy on coming up with a trebly relevant name.
Once you think about distributed power, the need to generate mass amounts in one place seems to be less important, though having access to cleaner and safer ways of doing so are still good things as no doubtsome of us will still rely on the grid sometimes.
I'm sick and tired of this "but it's intermittent" canard.
Also to note - the framework to transfer/sell power from an area of excess to another (i.e., P2P power supply) is nonexistent, let alone trying to merge that with centralized power (for right now, you can only really sell your power to the utility - and they don't like it because it costs a lot for them to manage it).
Solar/Wind are very very important to a diverse and strong power mix (and for low stable energy prices), but combined with fission (or fusion once it's feasible) or other traditional power sources, you get a lot more stability and predictable power generation.
Thus in such areas, a centralized grid is needed to transport electricity from where it is available to where it can be used. This can be nuclear, but it can also be renewable energy, e.g solar energy from southern Spain and Sahara or wind power from Norway in the case of Germany, but to produce everything locally won't work a lot of places.
As for molten salt reactors.. still lots of problems to be solved related to the combination of molten salt and high temperature (I recall there being an US based molten salt reactor that got it's cooling cycle contaminated somehow.. but can't seem to find it right now)
This is scary: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
The market is what helps the world adjust. Unless a dramatic event causes a significant change in prices in a short time, things will carry on just like they always have.
E.g., you used up the fuel in the car too fast, and can't reach the next gas station.
This process is much easier to do in secret than the centrifuges that are required to separate isotopes of uranium. Thus thorium is worse for proliferation, not better.
A liquid-fueled reactor could be another matter, and we'd want to keep an eye on them in non-nuclear states. But another factor is the breeding ratio, which is barely over one for thermal thorium. If someone were to pull out much fissile, the reactor would shut down, and they'd have to go begging for more fissile to start it up again.
Another advantage for liquid fuel is very high burnup, so pretty much all you're taking out of the reactor is fission products, not leftover fissile that could theoretically be reprocessed.
Who the hell thinks "cold fusion" when they hear thorium?
So these guys are standing right next to a fuel rod radioactive enough to start a nuclear chain reaction? [0] Can anybody elaborate on how dangerous this is?
[0] only if close to lots of other fuel rods, I guess...
However, the US govt. doesn't need to produce bombs anymore - they've done enough work to know how to extend the life of the bombs they do have, as well as how to go about reprocessing the plutonium in warheads that are too old into new ones (I think). They are reducing the number of warheads in service, so the US has shut down domestic production.
The Russians seem to have caught up to the US in the warhead lifespan tech and they seem to have shut down their breeders too?