Thorium, not just for gas lantern mantles.
China runs ahead with our technology, and that’s an amazing low-carbon energy source – nuclear fission reactors that run on abundant thorium… and I mean abundant!
The US has been sitting on 3,250 tons of thorium nitrate. Thorium is dissolved in molten fluoride salt, along with uranium-233 as a regenerated neutron source. The liquid fluoride thorium reactors or LFTRs can use up the thorium nearly completely, vs. 2% ‘burn’ of uranium in today’s reactors.
The reactor produces about 1% as much radioactive waste as a uranium reactor. It can’t melt down, and not just because it’s already melted – heat it too high and it goes subcritical. A LFTR can be started and stopped, ramped up or down and not suffer violent instability as did Chernobyl – a LFTR can chase varying loads of generating electricity unlike today’s reactors. Terrorists would find LFTRs highly undesirable, with their ‘hard gamma’ rays.
So, do they exist? One did, in the ‘60s at Oak Ridge National Lab. What happened? The cold war happened. Adm. Hyman Rickover forced LFTRs to be abandoned in favor of pressurized water uranium reactors for submarines. The LFTR is not dead. The US has a tiny program in its Generation IV research… while China is building a LFTR now. Can we catch up, catch up with our own tail like the cat? We’ll see!
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
