Newsha Sajadi

ECON 201
12/11/14
Heinsma
Thorium: The Alternative for Alternatives
INTRO: Why should we care? How does this relate to you? Lets begin simplistically. Does
anyone here eat food? Raise of hands please. Good. You are a victim of energy. Now, we can
take this mundane concept and expand it on an industrial scale, namely the energy industry.
Energy is multifaceted topic. For the sake of time, I will briefly introduce you to the world of
energy, its history, and then shed some insight that may hopefully raise some eyebrows, and then
some.
BACKGROUND: When we talk about energy, there are a few requirements we ask our energy
to comply to. They come as follow. We want our energy to be available, and by available I mean
the technology itself to use as an energy source. Second, we need it to be cheap because
expensive energy simply doesnt make sense. Third, it needs to be controllable and safe. Fourth,
it needs to be abundant. Finally, especially in this century, we need our energy to be clean.
What are our sources of energy that we use nowadays on the planet? First, we have the
fossil fuels, namely oil, coil, and gas. On the other side of the spectrum, we have what we call
the renewables. Namely wind, solar, and hydroelectric power. Finally, we have the nuclear
energy.
How do these energies comply with these requirements aforementioned? If you look at
fossil fuel, they are essentially available, cheap, controllable and safe, abundant??? Fossil fuels

are a finite resources. They will eventually die out. They are not sustainable to seek out. Further,
they are not clean. CO2 emissions anyone? Global warming anyone?
Of course, when you see this, the answer thinks automatically, okay we go for renewables
right? Yeah, obviouslymaybe. They are available, controllable and safe, abundant, and they are
clean. We have a winner here, right? Not quite. The problem with renewable at the moment is
they are not cheap. Here is a quick example. Energy has to be stored as a consequence. The price
tag for this is contemporarily bad.
This is a quick comparison between the prices of fossil fuels and solar energy. You see
where this tanks.
Where do we go now? All the industrial countries postulate, if you want to fight Co2
emissions, and we cannot right now rely on renewables because they are expensive and
economically unviable, so where do we go? Lets go nuclear!
Nuclear is available, abundant, cheap, safe?? The problem with nuclear is its not safe.
Mind you, still in the world, it has the lowest casualty rate per Kilowatt rate per hour produced,
but the phobia is there, and there is a good reason for it. Especially nuclear is not clean. Its a
very dirty process. Especially after Fukushima. What are you saying here Newsha? Fossil out the
window, renewable no, nuclear trashed. Not so fast. We have a solution. The solution was
developed in the 60s and was put in the drawer for weird reasons. There is relatively new type of
nuclear energy. Before we delve in, nuclear understanding is required. This is going to get
technical. Please bear with me.
I will keep this as simple as possible.

Here we go. When you want any kind of production of energy, we need a heat source.
That heat source can be out of fossil, fuel, or anything else. That heat source will boil some
water. That water will then transform into vapor, that vapor go into the generator, which will
produce electrical power to the grid. Basic, simple. We all know that. Nuclear is no different than
that. So the actual nuclear energy we have all over the world goes like this.
It starts with this process we call big mining of uranium, and we have this enrichment
plant to produce the uranium-enriched plant. Little note (and by little note I mean big note), by
the way when you have a uranium-enriched plant, you can produce nuclear. Thats another issue
with nuclear energy world. This is called proliferation. Finally, you put those pallets into the
reactor.
PROCESS: How does this reactor work? What we have right now is a light water reactor. Most
commonly used technology worldwide. It is a big, thick, steel tank. This big, thick, steel tank
will be filled with water up to the rim. Then, we put inside it the solid fuel. Here is an example.
What is the enriched-uranium fuel cell? It is like holding a rod of metal that suddenly starts
glowing red hot in your hands. Theres nothing magical about it. This is nuclear energy. Put it in
the tank, suddenly this thing starts boiling water, up to 300 degrees Celsius. At this temperature,
water becomes vapor. So, we want to keep water liquid, for this reason. We put it under high
pressure, something around 153 atmospheric pressure.
This is a trivial question. When you have very hot temperature with very high pressure in
a tank, and you fail to cool it down, what will happen? Boom? This is exactly what happened at
Fukushima. A little bit, give or take. Thats why we add to this reactor core some redundant
cooling systems. We build over it some construction (concrete confinement chamber). All this
just to keep it from going off.

These are the reactors that we have right now in the world. This is the guy. This is Alvin
Weinberg. This is the guy that invented the light water reactor. In the 60s this guy came up with
an idea. He said, what if we can do something with nuclear that makes it safe, clean, abundant,
cheaphuh? You just went all possibilities, Newsha. He did it. He built what he called the
Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (1965-1969).
The idea of the MSR was basically to reduce replace the whole mix of solid fuel and
water with something we called salts. They are solid at normal temperature, and at high
temperature they become liquid. Essentially, it all boils down to this. Im replacing all this trash
inside the reactor, with uranium fluoride. Okay, uranium fluoride is a little bit like sodium
fluoride, except you cannot brush your teeth with that. Here it is, we have something that is
liquid at high temperature, doesnt need pressure, and there goes the pressure chamber. Since it
doesnt need any cooling system, there goes the cooling system. Finally, of course, we dont need
the confinement chamber.
This is nice. Small. Cute.
The guys at Oakridge used to shut it down at the weekend and turn it on the following
Monday.
Alvin came up with another idea. He said, what if we can use, instead of Uranium, we
can use something much more abundant, and easy to use. What if we can use Thorium? What is
thorium? Thorium is an element that you find virtually everywhere. In every cubic meter of soil
you have one gram of thorium. Of course there are places much richer in thorium. Virtually, you
find it everywhere. In the kitchen, your granite slabs contain thorium. The energy of the Earth,
the molten core of the Earth, is essentially due to the decaying of thorium.

Thorium is already giving us energy here. Moreover, thorium is a very concentrated kind
of energy. If you want to light up the planet with thorium, you need just 6000 tons of thorium per
year. Not only that, if you want to compare it to the uranium cycle in waste management, in the
annual uranium cycle to produce 1 Gigawatt a year, you need 250 tons of uranium that will
produce 215 tons of waste, which will stay radioactive for 10,000 years. Watch now. Thorium
only needs 1 ton. That 1 ton will produce 1 ton of waste, and that 1 ton of waste, 83% of which
will become stable only in 10 years. Amazing.
Thats not all about thorium. Thorium is also nice because its very cheap. Its so cheap
here is an idea. To produce 1 Gigawatt of electricity per year out of fuel oil, which is petrol, we
need something like $1.5 billion a year. Do you know how much we need from thorium?
$50,000.
Thorium is very abundant. We find it everywhere. The estimated reserves worldwide are
for thousands and thousands of years.
CONCLUSION: The Molten Salt Thorium Reactor is an available technology, it is cheap, safe,
abundant, and especially clean.
Here is the big question now. Why dont we find molten salt thorium reactors everywhere
on the planet? The reason is when Alvin Weinberg presented his final version of the reactor, his
funding stopped for no scientific reason whatsoever. The reasons were the US army at that time
was not interested into funding reactor that did not produce nuclear weapons. On the other hand,
the nuclear industry in the US was locked down in the old technology. Shifting to a new one
would cost them a lot. Finally, politicians. They are mostly interested in votes. The program died.
That is not the end of the story however.

There are people, physicists, grassroots movements, such as John Kootch and his thorium
alliance, pushing all over the world to build that reactor, because they believe, as I do believe, as
clich as this saying is, this reactor can save the world. Next time you have discussion with
friends and family, especially with policy makers, dont forget that we have a fourth option that
can change the world of tomorrow.