Breeder or Thorium Reactors

apollo11

Banned
What would it take for the majority of Earth's energy generation to come from breeder or thorium reactors by ATL 1 Jan 2018? Why haven't we invested in that reactor technology in OTL?
 
What would it take for the majority of Earth's energy generation to come from breeder or thorium reactors by ATL 1 Jan 2018? Why haven't we invested in that reactor technology in OTL?

Fear - arguably well founded - and difficulties getting the engineering and economics to work out are the most obvious things preventing breeder and thorium reactors from going commercial, or at all really. So to get these types of reactors to be a dominant technology you would have to prevent the anti-nuclear movement from gaining any real strength, change the economics of things like uranium mining - forecast shortages and high prices being the publicly stated justification for breeder reactors - and solve any engineering issues.

That would include the apparent quality control issues during construction. Reports of cooling pumps put in backwards and being the wrong pumps anyway, earthquake attenuation features built in a mirror image of their correct position in a reactor built over the San Andreas Fault etc did not induce high confidence and a willingness to go along with the 'Nuclear is safe' message.
 

apollo11

Banned
Fear - arguably well founded - and difficulties getting the engineering and economics to work out are the most obvious things preventing breeder and thorium reactors from going commercial, or at all really. So to get these types of reactors to be a dominant technology you would have to prevent the anti-nuclear movement from gaining any real strength, change the economics of things like uranium mining - forecast shortages and high prices being the publicly stated justification for breeder reactors - and solve any engineering issues.

That would include the apparent quality control issues during construction. Reports of cooling pumps put in backwards and being the wrong pumps anyway, earthquake attenuation features built in a mirror image of their correct position in a reactor built over the San Andreas Fault etc did not induce high confidence and a willingness to go along with the 'Nuclear is safe' message.
Assuming this ATL did go on in on breeder tech could it become as useful as fusion technology? I've watched Issac Arthur videos on fusion and he posits that fusion technology would be a game changer. Could the same be said for more advanced fission or is it a dead end?
 
If the nuclear industry had as good of PR as Big Oil and Big Coal, then most people wouldn't care about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima the same way most people reacted to Deepwater Horizon or the myriad of coal ash spills or other refuse from coal mining and coal plants, which contains several radioactive materials like radium, radon, and polonium. But they were rather screwed from day one thanks to the fact that to the public, the greatest exposure to nuclear power they had started with the atomic bombs in WWII and later the nuclear testing and the threat of nuclear annihilation and nuclear winter during the Cold War. Personally, I find it strange how people got so paranoid over ocean water on the West Coast showing minute traces of contamination from Fukushima when every few years accidents with coal ash ends up poisoning a river (like this incident in 2014 in North Carolina) and even once "clean", still might pose hazards to health, at least as much as Fukushima did/does to Americans. You also see a lot less media attention on these spills, and it took something like Deepwater Horizon to actually get a ton of attention in the media.

Assuming this ATL did go on in on breeder tech could it become as useful as fusion technology? I've watched Issac Arthur videos on fusion and he posits that fusion technology would be a game changer. Could the same be said for more advanced fission or is it a dead end?

As the saying goes, "fusion is always decades away". There's also the problem that early fusion might be more expensive to install than an already functioning Gen IV nuclear reactor (using thorium). And IIRC, fusion research has attracted disproportionate amounts of funding compared to fission reactors using proven technology. It's much better at this point to proceed under the assumption that economic fusion reactors are impossible and focus on refining fission technology which beyond anything else, has the potential for clean energy to power Earth.

If we were installing a bunch of Gen IV nuclear reactors right now to replace our Gen III reactors (Gen II reactors like Fukushima with their much greater dangers having long since been in the process of decommissioning), and Gen V reactors were on the horizon, we'd be in a much better place in terms of energy and the environment. I think it is somewhat of a dead-end technology in the sense that yes, you have fusion one day, and you also have improved wind and especially solar energy to worry about, but superior solar energy will take better economics to get, since materials used in solar panels like indium, tellurium, or ruthenium are rare and expensive, and processing new sorts of ores which contain them would take a lot of new power sources. If you have thorium power, then you can definitely work around that and get your ores either way. Overall, the end game without fusion would be space-based solar power, with wind and Gen IV reactors picking up the slack--these advanced fission reactors would also be used in every place solar power was impossible or inefficient, like in the outer Solar System. Earth-based solar power is still great, since at this point you can mine the moon and asteroids to seriously drop the price of those rare elements to make your solar panels on Earth better.
 

apollo11

Banned
focus on refining fission technology which beyond anything else, has the potential for clean energy to power Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

I just looked up the energy density chart and it seems like a Uranium Breeder produces quite a bit of energy. The gap doesn't look that large between fusion and fission. Besides the abundance of hydrogen and deuterium am I missing the draw of fusion? It doesn't seem to be that big of an improvement on fission. Or does the draw come all the way down to availability of fuel and lack of nuclear meltdowns?
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

I just looked up the energy density chart and it seems like a Uranium Breeder produces quite a bit of energy. The gap doesn't look that large between fusion and fission. Besides the abundance of hydrogen and deuterium am I missing the draw of fusion? It doesn't seem to be that big of an improvement on fission. Or does the draw come all the way down to availability of fuel and lack of nuclear meltdowns?

Hydrogen is the most abundant stuff in the universe by far, and powering something on water, solar wind, or the interstellar medium is just too good compared to mining uranium or thorium to get the same effect. There's also the safety and nuclear waste disposal issue with fission. The problem with fusion is we don't have it economically and it may take us a long time to get it, while we do have fission power instead. Of course, there is a natural fusion reactor we can use for energy, it's been active for almost 5 billion years now but is still a great source of energy.
 
What would it take for the majority of Earth's energy generation to come from breeder or thorium reactors by ATL 1 Jan 2018? Why haven't we invested in that reactor technology in OTL?
The simple answer is that the only big investments in reactor technology have been for plutonium production (strictly speaking a breeder reactor - the MAGNOX, RBMK, etc. reactors were designed for this) or submarine propulsion (PWR). Modest amounts of money have been spent commercialising these, and on other reactor types. Because fossil fuels are cheap and readily available, nobody has cared enough to invest lots of money in new reactor designs - even France with a massive civil nuclear programme decided to use adapted and enlarged submarine reactor designs (PWRs) rather than superior but less developed technologies.

Fear - arguably well founded - and difficulties getting the engineering and economics to work out are the most obvious things preventing breeder and thorium reactors from going commercial, or at all really. So to get these types of reactors to be a dominant technology you would have to prevent the anti-nuclear movement from gaining any real strength, change the economics of things like uranium mining - forecast shortages and high prices being the publicly stated justification for breeder reactors - and solve any engineering issues.
Economics is the killer. With a nuclear power station the fuel is virtually free, so you essentially buy 30 years of electricity up front. With fossil fuels it's the other way around - the fuel is expensive but the plant is cheap. With fossil fuels being fairly cheap, unless you get the capital cost of a nuclear plant down much lower than it has been historically then nuclear electricity will be much more expensive than that generated from fossil fuels - unless externalities like CO2 are factored in, which they haven't been historically.

If the nuclear industry had as good of PR as Big Oil and Big Coal, then most people wouldn't care about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima the same way most people reacted to Deepwater Horizon or the myriad of coal ash spills or other refuse from coal mining and coal plants, which contains several radioactive materials like radium, radon, and polonium. But they were rather screwed from day one thanks to the fact that to the public, the greatest exposure to nuclear power they had started with the atomic bombs in WWII and later the nuclear testing and the threat of nuclear annihilation and nuclear winter during the Cold War. Personally, I find it strange how people got so paranoid over ocean water on the West Coast showing minute traces of contamination from Fukushima when every few years accidents with coal ash ends up poisoning a river (like this incident in 2014 in North Carolina) and even once "clean", still might pose hazards to health, at least as much as Fukushima did/does to Americans. You also see a lot less media attention on these spills, and it took something like Deepwater Horizon to actually get a ton of attention in the media.
One of the problems is that people don't really understand the underlying physics and are very poor at assessing risk. Butterflying away Hiroshima and Nagasaki would help, but it's always going to be tricky to get public support for nuclear power.

As the saying goes, "fusion is always decades away". There's also the problem that early fusion might be more expensive to install than an already functioning Gen IV nuclear reactor (using thorium). And IIRC, fusion research has attracted disproportionate amounts of funding compared to fission reactors using proven technology. It's much better at this point to proceed under the assumption that economic fusion reactors are impossible and focus on refining fission technology which beyond anything else, has the potential for clean energy to power Earth.

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The reason it's so far away is that it gets trivial amounts of money compared to what would be needed to get it working within a reasonable timeframe - which of course is then used as a stick to beat the fusion programme with for not delivering in time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

I just looked up the energy density chart and it seems like a Uranium Breeder produces quite a bit of energy. The gap doesn't look that large between fusion and fission. Besides the abundance of hydrogen and deuterium am I missing the draw of fusion? It doesn't seem to be that big of an improvement on fission. Or does the draw come all the way down to availability of fuel and lack of nuclear meltdowns?
Energy density is utterly irrelevant here - that just includes the fuel, but for the example of fusion a 5,000 tonne Tokamak will only have about the weight of a postage stamp of Deuterium-Tritium mix inside. Similarly with fusion - there will only be a few hundred kilos of fuel behind tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete.[/QUOTE]
 
Breeders.
France had the Phénix and Superphénix. They didn't work out as well as hoped.
Also, breeder reactors require fuel reprocessing, which has huge lobbies against it.
Note that Candus are, or at least can be, slow breeders.

Thorium.
What others have said about initial funding, and plutonium.
Again, Candus can use Thorium with minor tweaks, and tests have been run. However, iirc, Canada doesn't have a good supply of Thorium, so we stuck to Uranium.
The Indians, who do, are currently making a major effort to build Thorium rector's.
 
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