Thorium: No Silver Bullet for Nuclear Industry
Thorium: No Silver Bullet for Nuclear Industry
A new Briefing, authored by Oliver Tickell, explodes the idea that nuclear reactors using thorium as fuel might provide a viable alternative to reactors using uranium.
This has become something of a rallying cry for those who recognise that conventional nuclear technologies are in terminal decline – including a baffling number of environmentalists who have come to believe that thorium could provide some kind ‘silver bullet’ solution to the nuclear industry’s woes.
They are deluded.
This Briefing (“Thorium: Not ‘green’, not ‘viable’, and not likely”) is the latest in a series of Briefings issued by Tom Burke, Tony Juniper, Jonathon Porritt and Charles Secrett to demonstrate that there is no conceivable economic case to be made for any new nuclear power stations in the UK – using either uranium or thorium.
The Briefing highlights the many drawbacks facing thorium reactors, including
· the very high costs of technology development, construction and operation;
· marginal benefits for a thorium fuel cycle over the currently utilised uranium / plutonium fuel cycles;
· serious nuclear weapons proliferation hazards: the molten salt reactor (MSR) technology promoted for thorium could be used to produce fissile uranium and plutonium at very high purities well above ordinary ‘weapons grade’;
· the danger of both routine and accidental releases of radiation, mainly from continuous ‘live’ fuel reprocessing in MSRs;
· the very long lead time for significant deployment of MSRs of the order of half a century – rendering it irrelevant in terms of addressing current or medium term energy supply needs.
In issuing the Briefing from Oliver Tickell, Jonathon Porritt commented:
“Advocates of Thorium as an alternative fuel for any future nuclear reactors are simply clutching at straws. It’s fantastical to suppose that a government that can no longer justify the massive waste of tax payer’s money involved in conventional nuclear power is going to sign up to a huge new R&D programme into ‘an alternative’ that would be just as costly, just as complex and just as irrelevant in terms of meeting this country’s pressing, low-carbon and energy security objectives”.
[Ends]
Twitter: Use #UKenergysecurity in your tweets to get involved in the discussion
Notes to Editors
[1] Nuclear Power: 10 Killer Facts (see attached)
[2] Read the Note to the Prime Minister, 13 March
[3] Why Nuclear Power makes No Sense for the UK
A series of Briefings from Tom Burke, Tony Juniper, Jonathon Porritt and Charles Secrett
1) Subsidising the Nuclear Industry (25 March – view online)
2) Investing in Nuclear: Current Concerns (4 April 2012 – view online)
3) The New Nuclear Industry (17 April – view online)
4) The Wider Economic Impacts of Nuclear Power (20 April – view online)
5) Why Nuclear Power is Not the Answer for Climate Change or Energy Security (27 April – view online)
6) Nuclear Power: A Toxic Issue Goes Critical for the Coalition Government (2nd May – see attached)
[4] Press enquiries, requests for interview etc: Mel Trievnor, 01242 266 778.
See online documents at www.jonathonporritt.com and www.tomburke.co.uk
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Joe Heffernan - July 15, 2012, 9:53 pm
I have been lloking at thorium as a reactor fuel for awhile now. It offers significant advantages over uranium as a fuel, especially when used in a Molten Salt Reactor such as LFTR. I think you will be shown to be wrong on all of the points you raise. For example construction costs should be significantly lower with a LFTR reactor compared to convetnional PWRs as the LFTR will operate at atomospheric pressure, has a simple method to shutdown and can employ robust passive safety features.
If you’re correct I despair for the future. We will not be able to arrest climate change nor raise the qualiity of life of the vast majority of the world with renewable energy. Instead people will take the low cost route which will be coal or shale gas.
Joe Heffernan
Dave Andrews - July 16, 2012, 3:32 pm
Oliver Tickell’s reply:
The thorium cycle does have some advantages over the standard uranium-plutonium cycle but in my view not sufficient to justify the huge investment and concomitant time-lag in getting it working. There are indeed cost savings involved in the LFTR design for the reason you give but also major problems of materials science / engineering re the containment, and massive technical challenge of getting the continuous on-side reprocessing working given the high temperatures, corrosive materials, intense radiation and currently highly experimental nature of the pyro-processing technologies required. This leads me to suspect that the reactor may well cost considerably more than current ones. Indeed it may be that we could spend billions and never get the technology working on a production scale. But the single greatest problem is that LFTRs or indeed any MSRs can be used as factories for the sweetest, purest fissile uranium / plutonium ever made way better than current ‘bomb grade’ – once they have been got working, that is. So all in all, I would rather rely on renewables.
But please do read the report and let that be the basis of our debate!
Oliver Tickell