Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says I
Speaker 1: can see behind your eyes the things that I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm La I'm Joe McCormick. Okay, guys,
Speaker 1: you know I'm feeling I'm feeling kind of powerful today.
Speaker 1: For one thing, I've got the mystical acts in my hand.
Speaker 1: It's the sound of the misqu Okay, on a scale
Speaker 1: of like one to Genghis Khan, how powerful I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go with Alexander the Great, So that's like a seven
Speaker 1: or an eight? It's eight nine? Yeah, how many kill
Speaker 1: A lots of power? Is that? Well, you'd have to
Speaker 1: melt him down first, but then you could put him
Speaker 1: through some nuclear reactions and thus gain power, and hey,
Speaker 1: nuclear power. You know, I was gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: future of sneakers, but now I think I want to
Speaker 1: talk about the future of nuclear power. You know, when
Speaker 1: I look at your head sometimes I just think facile material?
Speaker 1: Do you Yeah? Not fast stile? I know. Okay, So
Speaker 1: you're talking about the material. What does fission? Right? Right,
Speaker 1: material that you know, it shoots off neutrons, things that
Speaker 1: cause heat and energy and power. Right, So we really
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about the future of nuclear power. Obviously
Speaker 1: our listeners would like us to talk about that as well,
Speaker 1: and we're not talking specifically about uranium nuclear power, although
Speaker 1: we will address that in this episode as well. We
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about thorium. Thorium. This is a user
Speaker 1: requested topic, So we had a user ask us to
Speaker 1: do an episode on thorium. So you should take that
Speaker 1: as a note of encouragement. If you want to hear
Speaker 1: us do a topic in the future right on end,
Speaker 1: tell us what it is and it may end up
Speaker 1: becoming a topic on the show. But what's the deal
Speaker 1: with thorium? Well, first let's talk about what's the deal
Speaker 1: with nuclear power in general? That should be a good
Speaker 1: place to start. Why nuclear power plants? So you know
Speaker 1: coal power plants, right, You know how we're getting power
Speaker 1: from that? We essentially we burn coal and we use
Speaker 1: that heat to uh create steam. You know, we turn
Speaker 1: water into steam and steam turns turbine, which creates entirely
Speaker 1: excellent works of fiction about dirigibles. Yes, yes, it always,
Speaker 1: but more importantly turns turbines. Yes, it more importantly turns turbine.
Speaker 1: Steam powers many things, including the imagination. But but one
Speaker 1: of the problematic byproducts of this process I got a
Speaker 1: little alliterated of there is that coal creates greenhouse gasses,
Speaker 1: lots of them. When you burn coal, you get a
Speaker 1: lot of greenhouse gases and other toxins, and that is
Speaker 1: bad for the environment. Yeah, it's significantly a contributor to
Speaker 1: global warming and climate change. And so a lot of people,
Speaker 1: of course have been looking into clean energy. But you
Speaker 1: are ready know this. You've heard this. So you've heard
Speaker 1: about solar, you've heard about wind power. But there is
Speaker 1: another energy that a lot of people think of as
Speaker 1: the sort of big elephant in the room when it
Speaker 1: comes to clean energy, which is nuclear. Right. It was
Speaker 1: kind of the clean energy of the nineteen fifties, and
Speaker 1: and nuclear power is clean ish, right right, well cleaner,
Speaker 1: And so I want to make a distinction here. No
Speaker 1: power source is without any greenhouse gas emissions, because even
Speaker 1: nuclear you have to say, mine uranium and transport that
Speaker 1: uranium to the size so that it's never gonna have
Speaker 1: like zero carbon emissions. But when you can look at
Speaker 1: it you can say basically, nuclear power is mostly carbon
Speaker 1: free and there are no direct carbon emissions from the
Speaker 1: reactor itself. Yeah, so you've got that. You also know
Speaker 1: that it's very it's I mean, it is quite powerful.
Speaker 1: You can power you can supply a whole power bread
Speaker 1: with it. A single a single nuclear reaction like a
Speaker 1: single atom splitting. You know, we hear about the splitting
Speaker 1: of the atom and how powerful it is in actuality.
Speaker 1: If you're talking about one individual reaction, it's like two millivolts.
Speaker 1: It's really really small. But the thing is it happens
Speaker 1: an aggregate. You've got not just one atom represented here,
Speaker 1: you have billions of atoms represented. So when those when
Speaker 1: you have that many reactions happening, that adds up really quickly.
Speaker 1: So they are very powerful reactions. It's it's efficient, and
Speaker 1: it's reliable. Yeah, assuming everything is working properly in the facility,
Speaker 1: everything is reliable. And thus we turn to the cons. Right,
Speaker 1: so the cons of nuclear power. Okay, so, um, you
Speaker 1: got a little bit of some leftovers, right, You've got
Speaker 1: nuclear waste. This is material that nobody should go putting
Speaker 1: their hands in or letting their kids play in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not going to end up being like the teenage
Speaker 1: mutant ninja turtles, You'll end up getting very sick. Right,
Speaker 1: It's stuff that you need to go something very safe with,
Speaker 1: put it away where nobody can get to it, ideally
Speaker 1: like bury it in assault mine under the earth, encased
Speaker 1: in a big thing of graphite, so that nobody gets
Speaker 1: anywhere near it. And you you might need to keep
Speaker 1: facilities like that secure because if you happen to get
Speaker 1: your hands on some of this material, it's possible that
Speaker 1: you could use it for nefarious purposes. Sure. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is dangerous, dangerous stuff, and so and it stays dangerous
Speaker 1: for a really long time, like well beyond your your lifespan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about that a little bit more later on, um,
Speaker 1: but but more presently, this is assuming I mean, these
Speaker 1: are these are the normal operational cons to nuclear power.
Speaker 1: What happens when stuff goes wrong. Well, we've got a
Speaker 1: couple of examples of that, right, I mean, there's some
Speaker 1: that we can point to that that range from range
Speaker 1: of severity from this was bad too. We still don't
Speaker 1: know how bad this is. Yeah, the things like Chernobyl
Speaker 1: and Fukushima, those those would be in the latter category
Speaker 1: when there is a meltdown, and it's not just that
Speaker 1: this is a local, timely disaster, but it's a disaster
Speaker 1: that lingers and can have significant effects for years afterwards.
Speaker 1: And even a disaster like Three Mile Island, which wasn't
Speaker 1: a meltdown, it was more it was a leak of
Speaker 1: steam where there was a worry that it had released
Speaker 1: radioactive steam into the environment. Uh and I mean, in fact,
Speaker 1: that was what happened. It wasn't as severe as a
Speaker 1: full meltdown, but still was an incredibly yea, it at
Speaker 1: least caused a lot of worry. Yes, well, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So these are you know, there's some real concerns that
Speaker 1: go with it, which is what kind of brings us
Speaker 1: to thorium, because thorium, at least the proponents of thorium
Speaker 1: have a very different story they'd like to tell about
Speaker 1: using that as a nuclear fuel as opposed to what
Speaker 1: we usually use, which is uranium or sometimes a mixture
Speaker 1: of uranium and plutonium. Uh So, what's the story on thorium.
Speaker 1: It's an element on the periodic to able right, Yep,
Speaker 1: that's an actinied, Yes, it is an actinid. It's very dense.
Speaker 1: It's one of those that if you look towards the
Speaker 1: bomb of the elemental table, that's where you're gonna find it.
Speaker 1: It was discovered by Yawn's Jacob Berzelius. Yawn's Jacob Berzelius,
Speaker 1: I love it, okay. Uh, he was a swell guy
Speaker 1: back in He discovered thorium, and he named it that
Speaker 1: after the great god of thor god of should have
Speaker 1: probably he probably is he? Actually, I'm sure, I'm sure
Speaker 1: after a long day of fighting giants he gets pretty
Speaker 1: thor Yeah you agreed before he moaned, alright, so at
Speaker 1: any rate? Uh puns and and and slips of the
Speaker 1: tongue aside. Yes, he named it after the god thor So.
Speaker 1: Thorium is mildly radioactive. Yes, it is radioactive, but not
Speaker 1: so much that it would you know, it's it's not
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that in the movies you come
Speaker 1: in contact with it and then and then moments later
Speaker 1: you're you're dead or you're dying. Right, I mean, you
Speaker 1: still don't want to use it to make a face moisturizer,
Speaker 1: but probably not. It's found most often in nature, is
Speaker 1: part of a rare earth phosphate mineral called monosite. And
Speaker 1: we've been using thorium for a while, not in a
Speaker 1: nuclear power use, but in other uses as an alloying
Speaker 1: agent to strengthen magnesium at high temperatures and also to
Speaker 1: coat tungsten filaments in television sets and other electronics. So
Speaker 1: if you have an old TV, you may just have
Speaker 1: yourself a little miniature thorium nuclear power plant. But not really,
Speaker 1: because that's not what's really going on. Okay, so you're
Speaker 1: gonna hear us throughout this podcast saying something with isotope notation.
Speaker 1: So that's going to be the name of an element
Speaker 1: followed by a number. The name of the element tells
Speaker 1: you how many protons it has, so it's something like uranium,
Speaker 1: and then the number after that is the mass number,
Speaker 1: which will tell you not just how many protons, but
Speaker 1: also how many neutrons, as so protons and neutrons added
Speaker 1: together gives you that number. Different isotopes of the same
Speaker 1: element have different properties and can have vastly different properties
Speaker 1: in fact, especially for radioactive materials, so like uh for
Speaker 1: simple example, carbon twelve has six protons and six neutrons
Speaker 1: and carbon thirteen has six protons and seven neutrons. So really,
Speaker 1: what the larger numbers tell you is how many more
Speaker 1: neutrons it has than the base level of the elements,
Speaker 1: because if I had a different number of protons, would
Speaker 1: be a different exactly. Yeah, if you change the number
Speaker 1: of protons, you've got a different element on your hands.
Speaker 1: And in fact, that's kind of what happens in a
Speaker 1: in a way with this this fission. You have elements
Speaker 1: that decay into other more stable elements when something happens. So,
Speaker 1: for example, in a regular nuclear reactor, you have uranium
Speaker 1: that will change into isotopes of plutonium. Yeah. Yeah, In fact,
Speaker 1: uranium will spontaneously undergo fission on its own, but you
Speaker 1: can actually induce it to happen by bombarding it with neutrons. So, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a great uh visual zation. I read about this,
Speaker 1: and in fact, I want to say, this was in
Speaker 1: how stuff works and how nuclear power works. So imagine
Speaker 1: that you have a pool table and you've got a racked.
Speaker 1: You've got a rack of pool balls that are tightly
Speaker 1: packed together, and you hit it with a cue ball
Speaker 1: and they scatter around. Okay, well, now imagine that instead
Speaker 1: of it being this two dimensional pool table, it's a
Speaker 1: three dimensional space where you have little packs of these
Speaker 1: racked cuball or pool balls, and you hit it with
Speaker 1: the cue ball that represents the neutron. You bombard this
Speaker 1: this atom with those different balls split apart, and then
Speaker 1: they hit other clusters of racked pool balls that are nearby,
Speaker 1: and those split apart and they hit other clusters. That's
Speaker 1: what we talk about when we say a nuclear reaction.
Speaker 1: This it is in fact, yeah, And if you are
Speaker 1: able to have enough of the reactive material packed together,
Speaker 1: once you start this reaction, it'll just perpetuate itself as
Speaker 1: long as there's enough of that nuclear material in the
Speaker 1: right the right configuration. Right. So, with a uranium based
Speaker 1: nuclear power plant, the way this works is they pack
Speaker 1: that uranium and it's uranium two thirty five I believe,
Speaker 1: and it has to be enriched to two or three
Speaker 1: percent uranium two thirty five. Uh. It's packed into little
Speaker 1: little pellets and those pellets are arranged in rods. So
Speaker 1: you've got these rods of uranium two thirty five and
Speaker 1: you then submerge them into water and you allow this
Speaker 1: reaction to start and it begins to perpetuate itself and
Speaker 1: it gives off this little bit of energy per reaction,
Speaker 1: but there are millions of reactions happening which immediately starts
Speaker 1: to heat up the water and after that it's a
Speaker 1: lot like the coal plant. Actually, yeah, you're really using
Speaker 1: that energy to heat water, to preferably water that's in
Speaker 1: a closed system that's not connected to the uh to
Speaker 1: the fusion core at all, so it's a separate water.
Speaker 1: You have a heat exchange where you exchange the heat
Speaker 1: with this uh this this tube of water that's essentially
Speaker 1: going around that then turns it too steam turns turbines, right,
Speaker 1: because you're also using water to keep the system at
Speaker 1: an appropriate temperature so that you don't have meltdown exactly.
Speaker 1: And a meltdown is when you get this uncontrolled nuclear
Speaker 1: reaction where the material just gets hotter and hotter, and
Speaker 1: since you're not able to cool it off, it literally
Speaker 1: melts into a pool of extremely dangerous stuff, which is
Speaker 1: what happened at Chernobyl and it's what happened at Fukushima.
Speaker 1: And because they were unable to monitor and maintain that
Speaker 1: temperature because all of their systems failed and uh, that's
Speaker 1: that's one of the drawbacks to uranium based nuclear power plants,
Speaker 1: that that that opponents will bring up They say that
Speaker 1: if the factory was to lose all power, like everything,
Speaker 1: all backup systems, kind of like what happened at Fukushima,
Speaker 1: then you would no longer be able to circulate water
Speaker 1: and continue to cool down the core, and it would
Speaker 1: just keep heating up until it had a meltdown. That
Speaker 1: you have to maintain power in order to keep it safe,
Speaker 1: and that one of the things that the people who
Speaker 1: who propose a specific implementation of thorium nuclear power say
Speaker 1: isn't a problem with their approach. Okay, so we've talked
Speaker 1: about how a standard uranium reactor works. How does a
Speaker 1: thorium based nuclear reactor work. A couple different ways You
Speaker 1: could do it. You could do it essentially the same
Speaker 1: way as the uranium power plant. Yeah. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: put thorium straight into a water cooled well, not straight
Speaker 1: into you would need to make a few changes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but but into into a water cool nuclear reactor.
Speaker 1: But um. But the thing about thorium is that although
Speaker 1: it will not undergo this change all on its own
Speaker 1: the way that uranium will if you've bombarded with neutrons
Speaker 1: um it uh will or if you bombard thorium two
Speaker 1: thirty two, which is the operative type of thorium I
Speaker 1: believe in these discussions with neutrons, it turns into thorium
Speaker 1: two thirty three and then eventually decays into uranium, uranium
Speaker 1: two thirty three to be specific. Right, that's the sweet spot. Now,
Speaker 1: what you're actually doing is you're using the uranium in
Speaker 1: a thorium reactor, the uranium that the thorium turns into
Speaker 1: when you bombard it with neutrons. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people say, look, when you're calling
Speaker 1: these thorium nuclear power plants, they're really uranium nuclear power plants. Well,
Speaker 1: but you do need a you don't need a little
Speaker 1: starter bit of uranium and and that will kick off
Speaker 1: this this nuclear reaction and then uh and then every
Speaker 1: little bit of uranium that is created out of that
Speaker 1: forgers the nuclear reaction. Right. So there, But there there's
Speaker 1: another way you can do this which still has this
Speaker 1: this process of thorium decaying into uranium and then uranium
Speaker 1: undergoing fission. It's still that same process, but it's a
Speaker 1: different implementation, which involves liquid fluoride. Right, liquid fluoride thorium
Speaker 1: reactors or lifter reactors. Yeah, and I'd say this is
Speaker 1: right now the most interesting thorium technology. It's certainly the
Speaker 1: one that's getting a most attention, I would say, based
Speaker 1: upon all the research I was doing, because it winds
Speaker 1: up being safer from meltdown certainly, and and and a
Speaker 1: couple other things. Okay, but so so how does how
Speaker 1: does this whole salt thing work out? Well, you gotta
Speaker 1: dissolve the thorium into these this fluoride salts. You also
Speaker 1: dissolve the uranium into the fluoride salts. And so imagine
Speaker 1: that you've got a chamber. UH. This chamber does not
Speaker 1: have water in it, so you don't worry about using
Speaker 1: water to cool it down. It doesn't have any active
Speaker 1: cooling system. It's all. It's all UH incorporated directly into
Speaker 1: the implementation here of this reactor core. You've got a
Speaker 1: graphite core that inside of it, you've got this this
Speaker 1: UH salt and uranium mixture. And on the outside of
Speaker 1: the graphite core, you've got it surrounded by thorium. All right. Now,
Speaker 1: when the uranium starts to undergo fission and starts to
Speaker 1: release these high energy neutrons, they will pass through this
Speaker 1: graphite core, encounter thorium on the other side, convert that
Speaker 1: into uranium, which through a mechanism that I have no
Speaker 1: idea how it works. I'm just gonna be perfectly honest,
Speaker 1: because I couldn't find any explanation of how the mechanism worked.
Speaker 1: That uranium will then go into the core to keep
Speaker 1: perpetuating this, uh, this reaction. It generates the heat. You
Speaker 1: still use a heat exchanger to do this whole water
Speaker 1: to steam to turbine approach that we've been talking about
Speaker 1: this whole time, but instead of using water to cool
Speaker 1: down the system, the molten salts themselves actually act as
Speaker 1: a coolant. They keep it under control because the boiling
Speaker 1: point of this these molten salts is higher than the
Speaker 1: operating temperature of the reactor itself, way higher, like almost
Speaker 1: a thousand degrees higher. Yeah, and because the salts are molten,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really make any sense for them to melt down.
Speaker 1: They already melted. It's already melted. So the ideas that
Speaker 1: you've already built a chamber that's able to withstand all this,
Speaker 1: now that's part of the the considerations we have to
Speaker 1: talk about. The will will address those in a second,
Speaker 1: I thought the neatest thing about this is that it
Speaker 1: can have a passive UH safety system. So you know,
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the other one that in order to
Speaker 1: prevent a meltdown you have to continuously circulate water to
Speaker 1: keep the reactor cool. But this approach, you don't do that. Instead,
Speaker 1: they have essentially what's called a frozen salt plug. So
Speaker 1: you've got these liquid salts that have been frozen by
Speaker 1: having a specific tube where you are putting a special
Speaker 1: blower on it to lower the temperature. Right, So you
Speaker 1: still need energy to to keep this this frozen plug
Speaker 1: frozen exactly. But if the power goes out, the frozen
Speaker 1: plug melts, and then all of that molten material will
Speaker 1: go funnel through into another chamber, a specific holding chamber,
Speaker 1: where it will rapidly, according to thorium proponents, cool and
Speaker 1: solidify and thus even possibly be ready to be used
Speaker 1: at a future date. So even in a worst case scenario,
Speaker 1: again according to the people who are really behind thorium UH,
Speaker 1: then you just end up with a big solid lump
Speaker 1: of fuel that you can still use in the future.
Speaker 1: And hypothetically, this entire lifter process takes place at normal
Speaker 1: atmospheric pressure near to normal atmospheric pressure. One of the
Speaker 1: great dangers of of the water cooled nuclear systems is
Speaker 1: that they are under extremely high pressure. Right when you
Speaker 1: increase pressure, you also increase the boiling point of any
Speaker 1: given material. So the more more pressure a material is under,
Speaker 1: the higher it's boiling points going to be. And that
Speaker 1: you're exactly right, Lauren, that those nuclear power plants have
Speaker 1: systems that are under extreme pressure, and that's one of
Speaker 1: the things that makes them so potentially dangerous. If there
Speaker 1: is a failure in the system to contain that pressure,
Speaker 1: you can have explosive results. And we're talking about steam escaping,
Speaker 1: like steam that's been pressurized to great levels and and
Speaker 1: heated to incredible temperatures. Obviously, that would be very dangerous
Speaker 1: to anyone in the immediate vicinity. And if that steam
Speaker 1: in fact carries with it radioactive material, obviously that would
Speaker 1: have greater concerns for an even larger area. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so all of this so far sounds like it's a
Speaker 1: you know, pretty good benefits of thorium or at least
Speaker 1: of of lifter reactor systems over traditional water reactor systems.
Speaker 1: What are some of the I mean is is thorium itself?
Speaker 1: Does that have any particular benefits? Yeah? Well, uh so,
Speaker 1: one of the things is that thorium is much more
Speaker 1: abundant in nature than uranium. Uh And there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different figures because it's hard to know exactly
Speaker 1: how much of a mineral we have on Earth. But
Speaker 1: uh what that What most people say is that thorium
Speaker 1: is about three to four times more plentiful on Earth
Speaker 1: than uranium is. And according to the International Atomic Energy
Speaker 1: Association slash Nuclear Energy Agency Red Book, the planet Earth
Speaker 1: has an estimated four point four million tons of total
Speaker 1: known and estimated thorium, and if you want to go
Speaker 1: with a more optimistic figure, according to the World Nuclear Association,
Speaker 1: it might be something more like five point four million.
Speaker 1: Uh So, why does this matter? Are we about to
Speaker 1: run out of uranium? Well not exactly, and it seems
Speaker 1: unlikely actually that will ever completely run out of uranium.
Speaker 1: But the thing is cost um As it becomes more
Speaker 1: difficult to locate and extract new reserves of uranium, that
Speaker 1: leads to an increase in price. So relative abundance and
Speaker 1: ease of extraction actually does matter. Yeah, obviously, Like if
Speaker 1: you if you get to a point where you could say, well,
Speaker 1: technically we still have x amount of this fuel out there,
Speaker 1: but it's going to require you know, a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty percent of the effort that we put forth in
Speaker 1: the past. You have to offset that some way. So
Speaker 1: there's like another return on investment question here, that is
Speaker 1: it is it worth to go and get that fuel?
Speaker 1: If getting the fuel itself, is that difficult to do?
Speaker 1: And thorium it gives us an alternative. Yeah, Thorium, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned before, it's found in the natural rare earth
Speaker 1: mineral monocite, and there's like I read about there's some
Speaker 1: big vein of that up in Idaho or something. It's
Speaker 1: it's apparently not that hard to come by. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was one guy. I saw a YouTube video where a
Speaker 1: guy was talking about the person was a strong advocate
Speaker 1: for thorium power plants, and I I was about how a
Speaker 1: front of his had a rare Earth mind in the
Speaker 1: United States and he estimated that he would be able
Speaker 1: to get enough thorium out of his one mind, which
Speaker 1: he said was not particularly special, uh, to power the
Speaker 1: entire globe for a year. Well, whether that's true, we
Speaker 1: don't know, but I don't. I wouldn't rule that out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if that's if that is true, then obviously
Speaker 1: that would be a big boon. I mean, that would
Speaker 1: be one of the big pros of thorium. Sure. What
Speaker 1: about the waist it produces, Yeah, that's a big one. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so it's gonna be really difficult to nail down
Speaker 1: actual numbers about the comparative advantage thorium lifter technology offers
Speaker 1: over a regular nuclear power reactor in terms of the waste.
Speaker 1: But pretty much everybody's in agreement that it's gonna be
Speaker 1: better some degree. Right. A lot of people are saying
Speaker 1: that it will produce a hugely smaller amount of waste
Speaker 1: just in terms of huge a much smaller amount of
Speaker 1: waste just in terms of volume. I saw a figure
Speaker 1: saying between a thousand to ten thousand times less nuclear waste.
Speaker 1: That's pretty incredible. Yeah. Another another figure I saw it
Speaker 1: was an advocate saying that it would be tents of
Speaker 1: a percent of the volume. That's um I mean, and
Speaker 1: that could very well be true. The counter arguments I've
Speaker 1: heard on that, by the way, are mostly uh mostly
Speaker 1: this is all conjecture, obviously, but they're mostly centered around
Speaker 1: the idea that if these nuclear power plants end up
Speaker 1: being uh like, if we end up making lots more
Speaker 1: of them, that in aggregate they will end up producing
Speaker 1: at least maybe not the same amount, but enough nuclear
Speaker 1: waste for it to still be a considerable problem. Though,
Speaker 1: just to put that in perspective, let's not pretend that
Speaker 1: the waste by products produced by something like coal or
Speaker 1: nothing to really worry it. Right, So if if you're
Speaker 1: gonna say something like that, oh, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: cleaner and more efficient nuclear took up a much larger
Speaker 1: percent of our energy consumption profile or our energy production profile, actually,
Speaker 1: um that that would be just as bad. Well, you
Speaker 1: could compare that to actually the fact that coal lash
Speaker 1: as radioactivity effect, isn't it. So yeah, we can certainly
Speaker 1: look at that. There's another aspect to the waste question,
Speaker 1: which is how long the radioactive waste remains dangerous, right,
Speaker 1: and how dangerous it is. Another aspect to the question
Speaker 1: of the waste by product is not just how much
Speaker 1: it produces, but how long it remains dangerous. So, of course,
Speaker 1: radioactive material has a half life, which means that you know,
Speaker 1: it takes this much time for half of it to
Speaker 1: decay into another mint um, And so that is a
Speaker 1: factor when you're looking at how long this byproduct is
Speaker 1: going to remain radio toxic enough to hurt somebody. Generally,
Speaker 1: people are saying that the byproducts of a thorium based
Speaker 1: reactor are going to remain dangerous for a lot less time.
Speaker 1: But again, this is one of those things where I've
Speaker 1: seen a lot of different figures and I don't feel
Speaker 1: confident enough to cite any one of them. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: none of us here are nuclear physicists. We are going
Speaker 1: largely by what a lot of other people have said,
Speaker 1: and most of the people who are saying things about
Speaker 1: this have pretty high stakes in the issue one way
Speaker 1: or another. So, Um, I would say the length of
Speaker 1: time that it remains radio toxic, at least to my mind,
Speaker 1: remains something that's debatable. Um, But I it could be
Speaker 1: that it's actually true that this stuff is good within
Speaker 1: five hundred years, whereas most you know, nuclear byproducts take
Speaker 1: a lot longer to become safe. Right, Okay, Um, but
Speaker 1: so we've talked about the waste, what about the actual
Speaker 1: energy yield before we get to the waste. That's also
Speaker 1: a big advantage, they say, which is they say that
Speaker 1: thorium has a much greater energy yield per unit of fuel.
Speaker 1: One estimate is that the yield of thorium is two
Speaker 1: hundred times greater than the yield of uranium, So like
Speaker 1: one pound of thorium produces as much electricity as two
Speaker 1: hundred pounds of uranium. Right. And really, when you're talking
Speaker 1: about water cooled reactors and uranium fuel rods, you're only
Speaker 1: getting some three to five percent of the potential energy
Speaker 1: out of that once you've converted it to steam and
Speaker 1: turbines like that. Right, Yeah, the the efficiency number is abysmal.
Speaker 1: You're generating lots of energy, but you're wasting a lot
Speaker 1: of potential energy in the process, or at least you're
Speaker 1: not able to useful work. Right. We've already mentioned this
Speaker 1: some of the safety advantages, right, Yeah, the fact that
Speaker 1: it has a passive system as opposed to an active system,
Speaker 1: so it's one that could work even when you lose
Speaker 1: all power to the facility. Uh, that would actually technically
Speaker 1: turn on the safety system because it would make the
Speaker 1: blower stop blowing. Then that frozen plug of salts could melt,
Speaker 1: and you would end up having the reactor drain into
Speaker 1: a containment vessel. And of course, since it's already melted,
Speaker 1: like you said, Joe, you can't have a melt down, right,
Speaker 1: So there's that. Okay, so all of this sounds really good. Um.
Speaker 1: We also mentioned earlier in the podcast about um about
Speaker 1: one of the byproducts of uranium water cooled processes being plutonium,
Speaker 1: which can be used in weapons. Yeah. Right, And this
Speaker 1: is a big thing also that proponents of thorium have
Speaker 1: latched onto, which is the idea that a thorium reactor
Speaker 1: could be a very strong impediment to nuclear proliferation, which
Speaker 1: means spreading of nuclear materials that people could use as
Speaker 1: a weapon. Right, Okay, So a thorium reactor still would
Speaker 1: produce material els that you could use to make a weapon.
Speaker 1: It would produce uranium two thirty three, which is something
Speaker 1: that could potentially be used to create a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 1: And that's the material that's that's primary in the reactor.
Speaker 1: It's the facile material, that's it's the chemical workhourse of
Speaker 1: your thorium reactor. But when thorium is irradiated and it
Speaker 1: and it produces uranium two thirty three, it also produces
Speaker 1: this highly radioactive, highly dangerous isotope, which is uranium two
Speaker 1: thirty two different. So if you want to retrieve the
Speaker 1: uranium two thirty three, you've got this horrible, horrible, nasty
Speaker 1: stuff mixed in and you need really sophisticated technology and
Speaker 1: facilities to harvest it without irradiating yourself. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why one of the arguments are
Speaker 1: saying that thorium is good to prevent proliferation is just
Speaker 1: that it's too darn hard to get the stuff that
Speaker 1: would have been useful in a nuclear bomb without you know,
Speaker 1: putting yourself. UH had a great risk of risk than
Speaker 1: the people that you'd want to bomb, So that is true.
Speaker 1: But I think this is also a good opportunity for
Speaker 1: us to transition to talking about some of the potential
Speaker 1: drawbacks to thorium, or at least some of the main
Speaker 1: questions that have been asked about the supposed benefits of it.
Speaker 1: And one of them is a criticism of this UH
Speaker 1: statement that thorium reactors would not be liable to allow
Speaker 1: proliferation UM and it was a comment piece published in
Speaker 1: Nature in two thousand and twelve, and basically it explained
Speaker 1: how it might be possible to get around this problem
Speaker 1: of the uranium two thirty two preventing you from getting
Speaker 1: bomb materials out of these reactors. Basically, what they mentioned
Speaker 1: is there's a totally separate process you could go around
Speaker 1: to create some uranium two thirty three from thorium, and
Speaker 1: that would be you separate from thorium the pro tactinium
Speaker 1: two thirty three, and then you allow that by product
Speaker 1: to decay into uranium two thirty three, which is good
Speaker 1: for bombs and that has little radio toxic byproduct. They said, Okay,
Speaker 1: so all this doesn't mean that thorium is bad. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know that uranium can be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: So the authors of the common piece in Nature, they
Speaker 1: just simply wanted to point out that thorium is not
Speaker 1: completely free of proliferation risks. Right. Well, and another drawback
Speaker 1: is when it comes down to the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: you're talking about creating a brand new type of nuclear
Speaker 1: power plant on a commercial scale. You're talking about a
Speaker 1: lot of investment, financial investment, right and we're not just
Speaker 1: talking about the investment it takes to say get the
Speaker 1: fuel or build the facilities. We're talking about research. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is sort of back to the drawing board, because
Speaker 1: today's uranium based nuclear power plants owe a whole lot
Speaker 1: to money that was originally dedicated to mill terry and
Speaker 1: weapons research around the time of World War two and so,
Speaker 1: governments were putting money into bombs and we happen to
Speaker 1: get some clean power as a result. But you might
Speaker 1: ask the question, well, can the peaceful pursuit of cleaner,
Speaker 1: safer energy provide the same incentive that war does well,
Speaker 1: especially since you know, the even the Cold War, you
Speaker 1: had the United States and the Soviet Union both pursuing
Speaker 1: nuclear power as also a means of generating nuclear material
Speaker 1: that could be used in nuclear weapons, right, So, I
Speaker 1: mean that was that was one of the ideas, was
Speaker 1: that not only do we get power out of this,
Speaker 1: but we could in theory makes as a byproduct of
Speaker 1: this terrific clean power, we can blow people up. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I mean that was you know, that's that's something
Speaker 1: that was an ongoing consideration even after the end of
Speaker 1: World War two, and yeah, convincing people to spend billions
Speaker 1: of dollars for the research and development and then the
Speaker 1: construction and maintenance of a new type of power infrastructure
Speaker 1: is that's a big deal. When you want to think
Speaker 1: about costs, think not just about the amount of money
Speaker 1: that goes into building it, not just in researching how
Speaker 1: to do it, but also in researching how to regulate it,
Speaker 1: which is a huge concern. Actually, you have to before
Speaker 1: you do this on a large scale, you have to
Speaker 1: create a regulatory framework like we already have for light
Speaker 1: water reactors. We don't have that for thorium based reactors.
Speaker 1: And we don't know how long that would take, how
Speaker 1: much it would cost. And it's something that you actually
Speaker 1: do need. I mean, you can't just have like unregulated
Speaker 1: nuclear power plants. Sure, even estimating all of those costs
Speaker 1: is really pretty tricky. Yeah, pretty much is impossible to estimate,
Speaker 1: to give a meaningful estimation. And there's there's some factors
Speaker 1: we just don't know yet. For example, Uh, these salts
Speaker 1: can be corrosive, and what happens if they are corrosive
Speaker 1: to the point where you have to consistently replace elements
Speaker 1: of your of your reactor so that you can, you know,
Speaker 1: operate it safely. And uh, you know, we don't really
Speaker 1: know the answer to that because we haven't had a
Speaker 1: case study that's lasted long enough on a commercial scale. Certainly,
Speaker 1: we haven't had one of those to really see what
Speaker 1: the effects are and how how concerning they should be.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of uncertainty which has fueled opponents
Speaker 1: of thorium to really say, look, this isn't we shouldn't
Speaker 1: be spending time or money on this approach because of
Speaker 1: these arguments. Yeah, well, there there are several uh different
Speaker 1: types of arguments that a lot of these opponents take,
Speaker 1: and one of them is something I'm kind of sympathetic to,
Speaker 1: which is that, Okay, if we think about how much
Speaker 1: money it would take and how much time it would
Speaker 1: take to invest in all this um, what if we
Speaker 1: just put all that into the renewables we already have,
Speaker 1: like solar and wind. I mean, if we could create
Speaker 1: offshore wind turbines and more efficient photovoltaics with all of
Speaker 1: that money, would we actually kind of like offset the
Speaker 1: benefit that would be gained from thorium in the first place. Well,
Speaker 1: I I don't know if that's true, but just the
Speaker 1: fact that it's possible is enough to make you think.
Speaker 1: There's a similar argument that says that by the time
Speaker 1: we would reach a point where thorium nuclear power plants
Speaker 1: would be commercially viable. We may have already reached the
Speaker 1: height of the renewable energy approaches, and it would be
Speaker 1: a moot point anyway, So that even if you did
Speaker 1: spend the money on this and you directed it toward
Speaker 1: thorium research, by the time it was actually something we
Speaker 1: could take advantage of, it would be it would be meaningless,
Speaker 1: would be obsolete. Yeah. Another sentiment I often encountered when
Speaker 1: I was reading about this was just that I think
Speaker 1: there are a lot of anti nuclear activists who sort
Speaker 1: of see this as it's just a distraction. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like an excuse to keep pressurized water reactors online
Speaker 1: while the powers that be, quote researching thorium is placating people.
Speaker 1: That sounds kind of like conspiracy thinking. To me, That's okay.
Speaker 1: It's on the other side too, the conspiracy thinking that's
Speaker 1: saying that it's the nuclear lobby that's against thorium, not
Speaker 1: they're not investigating it in order to maintain the stas quo.
Speaker 1: They're actively opposing thorium because they've got too much of
Speaker 1: a steak in the uranium based power. That doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1: It turns out that that if you are if you
Speaker 1: are of this particular mindset. You're convinced that the other
Speaker 1: side is working clandestine lee against you in some matter, uh,
Speaker 1: even if the two different ways that it's working against
Speaker 1: you are complete opposites. Although it is certainly true that
Speaker 1: many people have a huge monetary steak in keeping the
Speaker 1: status quo as it stands, I mean, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: I know that that's kind of the insidious base of
Speaker 1: many conspiracy theories, but that doesn't make it untrue. Oh no,
Speaker 1: I mean people who have money actually do spend that
Speaker 1: money to further their interests. Yeah, and that's not a
Speaker 1: not ada. And if you thought that perhaps that that
Speaker 1: in some points of this conversation we were overly critical,
Speaker 1: It's not so much that I'm critical of the technology.
Speaker 1: I'm not at all. In fact, I'm very curious to
Speaker 1: see this technology go further into uh, to to be
Speaker 1: tested and find out what the results are. I actually
Speaker 1: really hope that they turn out to be positive and
Speaker 1: are something that we can take advantage of in the future.
Speaker 1: The reason why we get a little kg and a
Speaker 1: little skeptical is because a lot of the reports that
Speaker 1: are out there are written by people who clearly have
Speaker 1: a vested interest in one side or the other of
Speaker 1: this argument, and thus it's very difficult to get unbiased information.
Speaker 1: And until we have more lifter reactor testing or that's
Speaker 1: one of those a t M machine kind of things, apologies,
Speaker 1: Until we have more lifter testing in firmly in place,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to say what the outcome of a
Speaker 1: lot of these questions that we've brought up. It's to
Speaker 1: be yeah, well, especially at the commercial levels, making it
Speaker 1: viable enough financially to be widespread. But if I can
Speaker 1: say one thing at the in sort of in favor
Speaker 1: of thorium, it's that I can't find any convincing arguments
Speaker 1: that thorium based nuclear power would be worse than current
Speaker 1: uranium based reactors. The criticisms that I see either boil
Speaker 1: down to a blanket rejection of all nuclear energy, or
Speaker 1: an argument may be correct, maybe incorrect, that thorium isn't
Speaker 1: so much better that it's worth it, right, so, in
Speaker 1: other words, that the improvements we would see would be
Speaker 1: so small that it would take too long for us
Speaker 1: to see any kind of return on that investment in
Speaker 1: the technology in the first place, right, or even that
Speaker 1: I I think that one of the biggest benefits here
Speaker 1: is the safety issue, and safety isn't monetize herble. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. I mean, it's that's a really
Speaker 1: dire outlooks. It's tough to it to say this, but
Speaker 1: a lot of these things really do end up depend
Speaker 1: heavily on how expensive is it going to be to implement,
Speaker 1: and if you end up you know, it's just the
Speaker 1: world we live in. Until we reach that magical Star
Speaker 1: Trek future where money is no longer a concern, then
Speaker 1: we have to take that into consideration. Well, let's get
Speaker 1: practical for a second. What's actually going on today. Are
Speaker 1: there thorium based reactors currently online or online in the past,
Speaker 1: and how is this working in practice? I want to
Speaker 1: start with one interesting fact that you all might not know,
Speaker 1: but that there were actually lifter experiments at oak Ridge
Speaker 1: National Laboratory in Tennessee half a century ago. You just
Speaker 1: bringing this up because you're from Tennessee. I am from Tennessee.
Speaker 1: Uh uh yeah. From the fifties through the seventies, scientists
Speaker 1: at oak Ridge pursued lifter or research. They built a
Speaker 1: molten salt reactor that went online in the sixties. I
Speaker 1: think it was sixty four. Uh, and it didn't actually
Speaker 1: run on thorium, but they were sort of proving the
Speaker 1: concept viable by running it on uranium two thirty three,
Speaker 1: which the isotope that thorium produces in fission. Right when
Speaker 1: you bombard it with a neutron, that's what thorium, yeah,
Speaker 1: decays into. So they were sort of in effect running it,
Speaker 1: but just without actually starting with thorium. And this went
Speaker 1: on until it was shut down by the Nicks administration
Speaker 1: in seventy three. So that's the end of that, right.
Speaker 1: And there are companies that are working on this, and
Speaker 1: some of them have have thorium reactors. They're not commercial
Speaker 1: reactors now, Uh, some of the researcher There's a thor
Speaker 1: Energy out of Norway. I like their name, Lightbridge Corps
Speaker 1: of the United States. Uh, there's there's one as far
Speaker 1: as I know that is still an operation in India,
Speaker 1: the Kakra par One. It might be the world's only
Speaker 1: operational thorium reactor. In fact, it was built in and
Speaker 1: it's a pressurized water reactor. I mean it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's not one of these lifters, but it is redesigned
Speaker 1: to run on thorium. Um and and I think I
Speaker 1: think that that might be a really good potential immediate future,
Speaker 1: especially for for thorium. Yeah, we're not talking about creating
Speaker 1: a brand new style of power facility. You're repurposing your
Speaker 1: kind of retrofitting, yeah, or or refitting rather um And
Speaker 1: you know, I've seen it suggested that even a blend
Speaker 1: of thorium and uranium in in a redesigned water reactor
Speaker 1: could reduce the the uranium fuel input and the waste
Speaker 1: output and also decrease this potential for proliferation. Yeah. They're
Speaker 1: actually also thorium reactors undergoing research in China, So the
Speaker 1: Chinese Academy of Sciences is running a thorium based research
Speaker 1: project and they're actually partnering with oak Ridge yet again,
Speaker 1: this episode brought to you by the Great State of Tennessee.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, this is that I actually do find
Speaker 1: this technology really interesting. And I mean obviously anything that
Speaker 1: any sort of research that goes toward meeting our energy needs,
Speaker 1: which is obviously that's incredibly important to us. Uh, I
Speaker 1: find citing and I hope it works out. It's certainly
Speaker 1: got a long way to go in the testing phase.
Speaker 1: And also just you know, making enough people have to
Speaker 1: prove to enough folks with money that this is worth
Speaker 1: the investment. That's the that's really the bottom line is
Speaker 1: what we're getting to and then they have to prove
Speaker 1: that it works. So step one is proving to the
Speaker 1: people who have the money, hey, this is something that
Speaker 1: deserves funding so that we can make working, commercially viable
Speaker 1: power plants. And then to actually make it happen, and
Speaker 1: to prove that it's it's a safe method of generating power.
Speaker 1: It's um I mean, it's a long road ahead, but
Speaker 1: it's something that's got some promise to it, whether or
Speaker 1: not we ever see it come to fruition or some
Speaker 1: other technology ends up taking its place. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: it'll be renewable sources. I'm a little skeptical of that too,
Speaker 1: just based upon the history of how inefficient those tend
Speaker 1: to be. I would love to see a world where
Speaker 1: we're running on solar power. I would love to see that.
Speaker 1: The big question there is can't it meet the need? Yeah? Exactly,
Speaker 1: that's the big one. A lot of conservationists that suggest
Speaker 1: that what you should do is cut down your energy
Speaker 1: consumption in the first place, rather than to try and
Speaker 1: find new ways of generating energy, but to make sense
Speaker 1: that that doesn't seem to be the way human race
Speaker 1: has um progressed since it's started settling down and making farms.
Speaker 1: But maybe we can make that conscious decision. That would
Speaker 1: be interesting to see people on moss doing that. Or
Speaker 1: maybe we'll see, you know, fusion reactors become a thing
Speaker 1: and make this whole discussion moot. Uh, that would be awesome.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about fusion reactors at some point again, I'm
Speaker 1: sure anyway, that wraps up this discussion about using thorium
Speaker 1: as a fuel source. If you have suggestions for topics
Speaker 1: we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking, you
Speaker 1: should let us know about it, because shouting it into
Speaker 1: the air is not nearly as effective as you seem
Speaker 1: to think it is. Send us an email our addresses
Speaker 1: FW thinking at discovery dot com, or drop us a
Speaker 1: line on the social networks we frequently, which include Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Google Plus. You can find us with the handle
Speaker 1: f W thinking and we'll talk to you again really sing.
Speaker 1: For more on this topic and the future of technology,
Speaker 1: visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota.
Speaker 1: Let's go places