'... Resolving the questions of waste and proliferation will help make the second life of nuclear much happier than its first. But there is plenty of scepticism about whether the existing companies, technologies and international institutions can achieve it. "The people who say they are going to bring us this renaissance are the people who brought us the Dark Ages," one industry critic told me. "This is Torquemada bringing us the idea of the Renaissance."
Where, then, is nuclear's Leonardo da Vinci? What if there was, say, a small technology company that claimed there was a different way of doing things? What if it was developing a nuclear fuel that produced 70 per cent less waste and nothing that you could use to make a bomb? Let's say it was chaired by one of the world's leading non-proliferation experts and advised by Hans Blix, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and UN weapons inspector. What if it had just been appointed consultant to the United Arab Emirates, which is expected to be the first Middle Eastern country, after Iran, to generate nuclear power? That might sound promising. But it would also probably sound too good to be true.
The company is called Thorium Power, and I met Seth Grae ...
[...]
According to Thorium Power, Radkowsky's fuel cycle design is unique because it is intended to use up as much of the fuel as possible in a single stage, making it impossible to extract any weapons-usable isotopes afterwards. "It's not the thorium, it's the design that matters," said Grae. A "seed" of enriched uranium starts a chain reaction in a "blanket" of thorium, which is then "spiked" with U-238 to prevent the U-233 from being easily separated afterwards.
Morozov told me that, with the fuel arranged this way, he has achieved a yield of 100MW days per kg of fuel, which compares with an average of about 60MW days in most uranium-run reactors. As well as being more efficient, Morozov repeated the company's central claims about the fuel: that it produces 70 per cent less waste by weight (50 per cent by volume) and 85 per cent less plutonium than standard light-water reactors, none of it viable for making a weapon.
Because of rising uranium demand and the long time that the thorium "blanket" can be burned in a reactor - up to nine years, as opposed to three for ordinary uranium fuel - the company also believes that a thorium cycle could be as much as 10 per cent cheaper than a uranium-run process. I asked Morozov if his experiments could really work on a commercial scale. "This is not an unrealistic idea," he replied.
Still, Thorium Power faces a sceptical public. According to Grae, once the fuel has run for three years in a Russian VVER-1000 reactor (the standard Russian uranium reactor), it will be commercially proven. That should happen in 2013. But this is the cautious world of nuclear. Mujid Kazimi, the director of MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, is one of the few scientists to study the Radkowsky design in detail, and he believes the company must do more publicly to demonstrate its claims. "They should be reporting on it more in the open literature than there has been thus far," he said. "I think that's obviously the dilemma here. How do you gain the confidence [and] at the same time retain the commercial edge?"
Kazimi said his own experiments show the Radkowsky design to be feasible and support its central claim - that it reduces the amount of plutonium generated in the reactor. But he said there were other complications, particularly related to the smaller but highly radioactive quantities of waste, that were yet to be resolved. "This is an arena where the risk of the unknown is taken very seriously," he said.
If scientific support for the fuel is one thing, political support is another. Just as Grae has tended Thorium Power's team of Russian scientists, so he has spent years nurturing politicians on Capitol Hill and assembling a group of non-proliferation experts to sell thorium to the world. He hired Tom Graham, the American diplomat who led the indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995, to be the company's executive chairman in 1997. Hans Blix joined the company as a consultant in February. Since last year, the company has also been working with opponents of the Yucca Mountain repository plan, including Harry Reid, the US Senate majority leader, on placing a bill before Congress supporting more research into thorium....'
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Good piece, e_i, we should be able to get away with pasting in a few bits, i thought these had most of the important points |
