Copenhagen Atomics

info@copenhagenatomics.com

Reply: Technical Issues

Dear Obble Smith,

The Guardian article from 2011 is old and not very sharp when it talks about Tho-
rium used in solid fuel reactors (which I do not advocate for) and Thorium used in
thermal (slow neutron) Molten Salt Reactors (same as LFTR), which I do advocate
for tirelessly.
It is true that Indias work on Thorium in solid fuel CANDU-style (pressurized heavy
water) reactors is not very valuable. It does not solve any real problems. It is also
true that big nuclear companies today (Areva, Westinghouse, etc.) are not very
interested in Thorium MSR.
In solid fuel reactors it is very hard to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff.
Thus everything is viewed as waste, even though this is far from the case. In Tho-
rium MSRs its possible to perform online or batch reprocessing. Thus any uranium
and plutonium or (232238 U,239241 Pu, etc.) can be kept in the salt indefinitely. Yes
some of them are radioactive for many millions of years and have to be kept in safe
storage on that timeframe if you remove them from the reactor and try to dispose of
them, as is the plan for must solid fuel. But since reprocessing allows for a simple,
safe, and affordable method of deciding what stays in the salt and what doesnt,
uranium and the like can be kept in the reactor until they fission into fission prod-
ucts. The fission products can then be removed from the reactor resulting in much
simpler disposal, only requiring safe handling for a few hundred years. Since the
salt can be reused from one reactor to the next youll never have to dispose of any
uranium, and the like, as long as youre operating molten salt reactors. In the end
232
U is a deterrent against malicious use of the fuel salt e.g. weapon production.
Technetium-99 is a fission product, thus it will typically be removed from the salt. It
is true that it has half-life of 21 thousand years. Technetium-99 is the single biggest
problem in the fission product waste stream. It is one of the technical issues I refer
to. Technetium does not exist in nature. Thus we do not know much about its
chemistry and we (CA) do not yet know how to separate it from the fission products
waste stream. But I think it can be done. If this can be done it can be put back in the
reactor and transmuted to something much less radioactive. This has already been
demonstrated by others. The problem is to efficiently remove it from the fission
product stream. But even if we cannot remove it from the fission product stream
there is so little of it that we just need to dilute the fission products waste stream a
little more to reach the same low radiotoxicity levels after 300 years as uranium ore
or store it for a little while longer.
Iodine-129 is another of the technical problems. It can also be transmuted and we
know how to separate it from the fission products waste stream. There is 8 times
less of it than technetium-99 and it has a much longer half life, thus the radiotoxicity
to humans is less. But there is one problem. It can be absorbed by the human body
or animals. Thus we do not want it to get into the food stream.
In total there are 7 problematic fission products isotope out of 1000. They are
listed in the box on the right side of this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Technetium-99). But lets be real. Yes, we would like to solve these problems.
But we are not likely to solve them from day one. But even if we never solve them,
these isotopes will never kill as many humans as present coal fired power plants
does annually. So it is something we should try to solve. But it is not a major issue.
Other technical problems:
One major problem is to find a way to produce enriched Lithium-7 at low cost. We
would prefer to use salts in the reactors that are based on 7 Li, but currently the
production of enriched 7 Li is small and very expensive. Someone needs to make a
big investment in this area, otherwise it will be difficult to make MSRs low cost from
the beginning.
In Copenhagen Atomics we believe we have found a smart and efficient way to
separate the fission products from the salt while the reactor is in operation with
vacuum nozzle spraying technology. But this has to be proven to work first with
none radioactive elements and later with radioactive isotopes. The separation of
fission products can also be done in other ways. But all of these also have to be
proven first. The best and least expensive method is most likely to win in the end.
It is highly likely that wet chemistry salt processing (likely batch processing) will be
needed to clean the salt. Some of this has been proven. But much more work is
needed in this field. We could start the first reactors without this technology being
proven. So it is not a must have. But it is definitely a nice to have before you raise
funding for the first MSRs.
If you use graphite as your moderator in your MSR, then you would also like to find
a low cost way to decommission the graphite after use. I think this can be done.
But I think it will be much more expensive than using heavy water as the reactor
moderator. If you cannot decommission the graphite in a good way after use you
will have a significant waste stream, which is undesirable.
These are some of the things that opponents of Thorium MSR refer to. You can
solve it after you have run the first reactors. But again it would be nice to have
a solution to at least some of these before you need to raise funding for the first
MSRs.
Some people in the Nuclear industry would like Thorium MSRs to last for more
than 20 years and I have even talked to people that say we should not build them
unless we are sure they will last longer than 20 years. I think: if they can last more
than 2 years and you can show how you can recycle most of the materials, then
this will be acceptable before you start the first generations of commercial Thorium
MSRs. But of course in the long term we should continuously try to improve the
lifetime of Thorium MSRs and also make sure we can recycle more and more of
their constituent materials. But lets be real again. I am sure that even 100 years
after we start the first Thorium MSRs for commercial use, we will still try to improve
on this. It is not something we can expect to fix up front.
If you want to burn spent nuclear fuel in your Thorium MSR, then you also have
to prove that you can process the spent nuclear fuel from old light water reactors

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and convert it into 3 "pure" streams, uranium, fission products and transuranics.
Some work on this needs to been done in public. But I believe that weapon states
know quite a lot about this. But still we need to demonstrate that it can be done
efficiently and economically in public. I find it highly likely that it can be done. But
still it needs to be proved and it is not easy to get approval to do this research as
of today. Thus this is mainly a political barrier that has to be solved before we can
prove it technically.
Tritium is another problem. Its a gas and has a half life of 12 years and is therefore
very radioactive. If released in large bodies of water or high in the atmosphere it is
not dangerous to humans. Simply because it is too dilute to cause problems and
after 120 years it will be reduced by a factor of 1000. The problem with tritium is
that its gas form (T2 ) can easily penetrate through the surface of metal pipes due
to the small size of the molecule. The next problem is that it is relative expensive to
separate from hydrogen but several methods exists. All reactors, including fusion
reactors, produce tritium and it is already handled in todays reactors. But big ques-
tion is if Thorium MSR will have strict rules from day one or if Thorium MSR tritium
control is allowed to develop over years just like it did with the light water reactors
and especially the CANDU reactors. The solution is technical, but it depends very,
very much on the approval and country. Again in Russia or Asia this is unlikely
to be a major problem. Copenhagen Atomics Waste Burner will use heavy water
thus it will produce more tritium than graphite based MSRs. Thus we will have
to pay special attention to the development within this area. However, we believe
that its important that health risk regulations for Thorium MSRs isnt set orders of
magnitude more stringent than that of coal fire plants.

Right now the above items are the major technical issues, listed by order of impor-
tance, that needs to be solved before we would be ready to roll Thorium MSR out
into the world in a really big scale.

Smaller technical issues that are also related to approval process:

Today all the major software packages for simulating nuclear reactor neutronics and
burnup have been made for solid fuel reactors. We would very much like to have
software packages that are optimized for liquid fuel reactors and provide enough fi-
delity for accurate design and optimization of Thorium MSRs. Some people believe
that it is unlikely that a country will approve a Thorium MSR for commercial use
before such a software package is available and has been validated. To validate
such a package you would need to build one or more demonstrative salt loops,
attach them to research reactors and then be able to accurately predict its or their
behaviour under a variety of situations and conditions. Holland, MIT and China are
likely to build such loops before 2020. And this will probably spin off some research
projects, which will make better software packages. But I believe a major effort is
needed, not just $1 million here and there.
But in the end the MSRE was run for 5 years without such software packages. Thus
it is not strictly needed to start a commercial Thorium MSR, but I think many people
in the Thorium MSR community would like it to happen. On the other hand, it is
likely to slow down the deployment of first commercial Thorium MSRs and it will be

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difficult to find enough funding for such fission loops and software development to
make a solid high quality product from day one anyway.
Some people believe that it is unlikely that western countries will approve a com-
mercial Thorium MSR before such software exists and are well proven. I find it
likely that this software will be proven in China, Russia or somewhere in Asia on a
Thorium MSR research reactor.

Some people say that it is likely that the approval process for a commercial Thorium
MSR in a western country will include approval of the plan of decommissioning. If
this is the case then the work needed for the approval process is more than twice
the work needed to just get the reactor approved for startup. In the worst case the
work and cost could be more than 10 times higher if decommissioning needs to be
included/resolved. This is a political question, which no one has an answer to.
I think you see the issue. If the approval process is already the majority of the cost
of building a MSR and the uncertainty is 10 times that, then your cost of raising
funding become too high for normal investors. If materials has to last for 20 years,
then approval process and R&D work is much, much more expensive than if you
only need it to last for two years. This relates to all items, pumps, valves, pipes,
heat exchangers, dump tanks, etc.

Some reactor designs uses BeF2 (Beryllium difluoride) which is toxic. This may
require special labs to handle and special rules may apply to any related waste
from their use. We do not plan to use BeF2 in Copenhagen Atomics for now, thus
I do not know the specific rules.

Next set of issues relate to choice of fuel and political agreements which influence
this choice. Clearly we can easily mine enough thorium to supply the entire world
with energy for more than 1000 years. But currently there are political agreements
that treat thorium as radioactive waste and/or weapons source material that make it
unlikely that any mining company will start to mine thorium to any significant extent
in the west.

However thorium supply is only one component in the equation, we also need a
kick starter (fissile) fuel. Kick starter fuel can be either enriched uranium-235 or
plutonium-239/241 from nuclear waste. There is a limited supply of both in this
world and both are further limited by international political agreements.
Some people say that we will find a way to extract uranium from seawater and a
way to enrich it much less expensively. But there is only 3 parts per billion (ppb)
uranium in seawater, thus I would not risk my own money on that claim yet. I do
believe enrichment can be made less expensive by a factor of 10, but even then
it will still add significant cost to the kickstarter fuel. Furthermore, other interna-
tional non-proliferation agreements dictate that we can only use uranium up to 20%
enrichment, which means that these reactors will create a lot of additional higher
actinides nuclear waste, which was the stuff we were supposed to burn in waste
burners. The third kick starter fuel option that is available, is to upgrade thorium in

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existing light water reactors to 233 U and then start the molten salt reactors on that.
Fast reactors is a fourth option, but I do not know enough about them and I believe
it will require significant technical and approval work to make them safe, thus I will
leave them out of the discussion here.
The uranium-235 route is the one, which scale best right now, if you do not care
about the waste. Plutonium-239 route scale very well if you can fix the political
issues related to it, but there is not enough plutonium in the world to scale to 100%
of current global energy consumption. Either way you will want to make the Thorium
MSRs into a breeder reactor, which will require very extensive salt cleaning or
heavy water moderated Thorium MSRs or fast reactors. Third option where we
produce uranium-233 in existing light water reactors will scale much worse than
the two above. But in reality there are startups pursuing all three routes and it is
likely that they will co-exist.

In conclusion, if we can solve the 7 Li problem, the political problems related to

processing of spent nuclear fuel to prepare it for the waste burners and the political
problems to mine and transport thorium and use plutonium-239/241 as kickstarter
fuel. Then we could easily power the entire world on thorium at very low price. But
in this process someone may try to create a monopoly on some of the items, which
make it very difficult to scale fast.
Finally a word about proportions: Yes there are some difficulties listed in this text,
but most of them are made by politicians in the west and it is not the western
countries, which need energy the most in the next 100 years. The technical issues
are much, much smaller than the technical / economic issues faced by the wind and
solar and storage industries, if wind and solar and storage were asked to supply
more than 50% of global energy.

Even though this answer was elaborative it still cuts down quite a bit on the details.
A lot of the issues with the publics negative perception of nuclear technologies
and the nuclear industry as a hole can be traced back to physicist and engineers
being forced to give simple answers to complex issues. So if you find any of the
information we have provide misconstruing, feel that we have misrepresent any of
the subjects in any way or that we exude favouritism, then we hope that you will
come forth with these concerns, such that a open dialog can be established.

Best regards,
Thomas Jam Pedersen and the team at
Copenhagen Atomics.