A Safer Nuclear Future?
On December 8, 1953, President Eisenhower made an address to the 470th Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, a speech now called the Atoms for Peace speech. In it, he noted that the US and the USSR, both with atomic weapons, had the power to do unspeakable damage to the planet if those weapons were ever actually used, and which resulted in a stalemate now called the Cold War, where the two nuclear superpowers reserved the right to destroy each other if one flinched:
To pause there would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world. To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation.
Pres. Eisenhower then continued, suggesting an alternative direction to a hopeless standoff. He proposed formation of a UN-led "international atomic energy agency" to "be made responsible for the impounding,storage and protection of the contributed fissionable and other materials" and, more importantly, "to devise methods whereby this fissionable material would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind."
Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.
Thus the contributing Powers would be dedicating some of their strength to serve the needs rather than the fears of mankind.
Here's some interesting alternate history fodder: What if the US had done more than create the military-industrial complex (the one Ike later described in his farewell address) dedicated to a synergistic vision that fed both corporate energy behemoths and supplied the US military with all the bomb and ship propulsion material it could want?
Let me explain what I mean.
I just caught another Chris Martenson podcast from last July. In it, he speaks with Kirk Sorensen (transcript at the bottom of the link) about his hopes to build a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR, or "LiFTeR"). The quick synopsis of a LFTR:
. . . uranium has two isotopes, one of which is fissile and the other of which is fertile - means it can become fuel, but isn’t fuel initially. Thorium only has only one really naturally occurring isotope and it's fertile. So you need some fissile material with which to start the reaction. . . . [T]he neutrons bombard thorium, and the thorium nucleus absorbs the neutron and turns into Uranium 233, which is fissile. . . . And that is really where the magic happens. When Uranium 233 fissions, it gives off enough neutrons to continue the conversion of new thorium into fuel and existing U233 into energy through fission.
This is, it turns out, absolutely nothing like the solid fuel reactors we have today. Sorensen explains:
From the original uranium ore that you mined out of the ground, you are only consuming about half of 1% of the energy there. And that’s not happening because we are stupid; it's happening because there is a basic limitation. . . . [In] the enrichment process where uranium is rich in the first place, five parts out of six of uranium become waste. . . . That is the uranium where you decrease the amount of Uranium 235 - so right off the bat, there is an 85% cut, so only like 15% of the uranium even makes it into the fuel rods and of that, only a few percent [of the rods are consumed for energy].
I've known about this limitation for quite some time in the end rod, but didn't know about all the waste at the pre-processing stage. (In fact, it was the waste storage tanks that initially exploded at Fukushima; the "waste" rods are amazingly hot, but after they're pulled from the reactor core they're kinda like Swiss cheese, with refined uranium shot through with the fission after-product, and thus lower in energy density. Too cold to boil water for a good reactor, but too hot to ignore for a few hundred years. Yikes.)
By comparison, consider a Lifter reactor:
If we use LFTR technology, if we use the liquid-fueled approach that we’re talking about, we anticipate that we can probably get above 90% [fuel efficiency]. The theoretical limit is about 98.5% that you could actually consume. . . . I mean there is almost nothing else in the world that is talking about this level of radical improvement technology.
(Emboldenation mine.)
From 1% to over 90% of mined fuel consumed and available for energy. Oh, it gets better. Let's consider fuel supply: on the planet, "thorium is about three times more common than uranium." It is, in fact, a waste product of other mining operations:
[When] rare-earth companies are looking for rare earths to mine, they will advertise that they have a low thorium content vein, because the thorium is considered worse than worthless. It's is radioactive - very low level radioactivity, but nevertheless radioactive, and they have to take regulatory steps to dispose of it. So to say it's cheaper than free - there are rare-earth companies that would pay you to take the thorium off their hands.
As if that weren't enough, it turns out there is already a supply ready for the taking:
Under about twelve feet of dirt in the Nevada test site in the United States, we recently buried about - I think it was 3,500 tons of thorium that had been in a strategic stockpile for fifty years. Back in the 50s when people like Alvin Weinberg were saying, “We’re going to run the world on thorium in the future,” the United States made a farsighted move to stockpile thorium. And then the people that were making thorium into reality got reassigned and fired and so forth, and in the early 2000s, they said, “Well what are we going to do with all this thorium?” “It's worthless, throw it away.” So that is essentially what they did.
So the best thorium mine in the world is sitting under twelve feet of dirt in Nevada right now in nice barrels that would be easily recoverable, isolated, and purified. . . .
It's that Alvin Weinberg fellow that makes this story interesting.
From the Wiki page linked above, we learn that Mr. Weinberg did some amazing research into "alternative" nuclear reactor designs, only to have a successful liquid thorium reactor expansion project shut down during the Nixon administration in 1972. He pressed to restart the program, but instead "was fired by the Nixon Administration from ORNL in 1973 after 18 years as the lab's director because he continued to advocate increased nuclear safety and Molten Salt Reactors, instead of the Administration's chosen Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) that the AEC's Director of Reactor Division, Milton Shaw, was appointed to develop."
That seems to be the problem with the liquid thorium design. Yes, it does produce a fissile waste product, Uranium 233; but according to Sorensen, this waste sucks as nuclear bomb fuel. From the Martensen interview once again:
Uranium 233 has never been used in an operational nuclear weapon. It has always been highly enriched plutonium and uranium. And there are some real disadvantages to using Uranium 233 for nuclear weapons, and I think that is why it's never been done and never will be done.
Many of the more traditional nuclear reactors, by contrast, can be used to breed bomb fuel as a part of their cycle. . . which is exactly the opposite of what Ike said needed to happen in his 1953 speech. The Atoms for Peace in practice became the Atoms for War (with a side-benefit of centralized electrical energy sources just to keep up appearances).
So, what if Ike's words were followed a bit more closely and the US had pursued what Sorensen describes as a far more efficient and safe reactor design? Even better, what if we finally follow Sorensen and the company he helped found and give this better reactor at least a try? It won't of course solve all our problems, but nothing in and of itself will. Pursuing a dissensus, a complete divergence from the former operating manual, one built of Cold War priorities and double-speak of the highest order, might be a good first step.
NB: I'm pulling double shifts at work all week, so this is a quickie, full of the flaws most quickies have. If I do further research on this and find it to be full of crap, I'll note such a thing later.
To pause there would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world. To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation.
Pres. Eisenhower then continued, suggesting an alternative direction to a hopeless standoff. He proposed formation of a UN-led "international atomic energy agency" to "be made responsible for the impounding,storage and protection of the contributed fissionable and other materials" and, more importantly, "to devise methods whereby this fissionable material would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind."
Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.
Thus the contributing Powers would be dedicating some of their strength to serve the needs rather than the fears of mankind.
Here's some interesting alternate history fodder: What if the US had done more than create the military-industrial complex (the one Ike later described in his farewell address) dedicated to a synergistic vision that fed both corporate energy behemoths and supplied the US military with all the bomb and ship propulsion material it could want?
Let me explain what I mean.
I just caught another Chris Martenson podcast from last July. In it, he speaks with Kirk Sorensen (transcript at the bottom of the link) about his hopes to build a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR, or "LiFTeR"). The quick synopsis of a LFTR:
. . . uranium has two isotopes, one of which is fissile and the other of which is fertile - means it can become fuel, but isn’t fuel initially. Thorium only has only one really naturally occurring isotope and it's fertile. So you need some fissile material with which to start the reaction. . . . [T]he neutrons bombard thorium, and the thorium nucleus absorbs the neutron and turns into Uranium 233, which is fissile. . . . And that is really where the magic happens. When Uranium 233 fissions, it gives off enough neutrons to continue the conversion of new thorium into fuel and existing U233 into energy through fission.
This is, it turns out, absolutely nothing like the solid fuel reactors we have today. Sorensen explains:
From the original uranium ore that you mined out of the ground, you are only consuming about half of 1% of the energy there. And that’s not happening because we are stupid; it's happening because there is a basic limitation. . . . [In] the enrichment process where uranium is rich in the first place, five parts out of six of uranium become waste. . . . That is the uranium where you decrease the amount of Uranium 235 - so right off the bat, there is an 85% cut, so only like 15% of the uranium even makes it into the fuel rods and of that, only a few percent [of the rods are consumed for energy].
I've known about this limitation for quite some time in the end rod, but didn't know about all the waste at the pre-processing stage. (In fact, it was the waste storage tanks that initially exploded at Fukushima; the "waste" rods are amazingly hot, but after they're pulled from the reactor core they're kinda like Swiss cheese, with refined uranium shot through with the fission after-product, and thus lower in energy density. Too cold to boil water for a good reactor, but too hot to ignore for a few hundred years. Yikes.)
By comparison, consider a Lifter reactor:
If we use LFTR technology, if we use the liquid-fueled approach that we’re talking about, we anticipate that we can probably get above 90% [fuel efficiency]. The theoretical limit is about 98.5% that you could actually consume. . . . I mean there is almost nothing else in the world that is talking about this level of radical improvement technology.
(Emboldenation mine.)
From 1% to over 90% of mined fuel consumed and available for energy. Oh, it gets better. Let's consider fuel supply: on the planet, "thorium is about three times more common than uranium." It is, in fact, a waste product of other mining operations:
[When] rare-earth companies are looking for rare earths to mine, they will advertise that they have a low thorium content vein, because the thorium is considered worse than worthless. It's is radioactive - very low level radioactivity, but nevertheless radioactive, and they have to take regulatory steps to dispose of it. So to say it's cheaper than free - there are rare-earth companies that would pay you to take the thorium off their hands.
As if that weren't enough, it turns out there is already a supply ready for the taking:
Under about twelve feet of dirt in the Nevada test site in the United States, we recently buried about - I think it was 3,500 tons of thorium that had been in a strategic stockpile for fifty years. Back in the 50s when people like Alvin Weinberg were saying, “We’re going to run the world on thorium in the future,” the United States made a farsighted move to stockpile thorium. And then the people that were making thorium into reality got reassigned and fired and so forth, and in the early 2000s, they said, “Well what are we going to do with all this thorium?” “It's worthless, throw it away.” So that is essentially what they did.
So the best thorium mine in the world is sitting under twelve feet of dirt in Nevada right now in nice barrels that would be easily recoverable, isolated, and purified. . . .
It's that Alvin Weinberg fellow that makes this story interesting.
From the Wiki page linked above, we learn that Mr. Weinberg did some amazing research into "alternative" nuclear reactor designs, only to have a successful liquid thorium reactor expansion project shut down during the Nixon administration in 1972. He pressed to restart the program, but instead "was fired by the Nixon Administration from ORNL in 1973 after 18 years as the lab's director because he continued to advocate increased nuclear safety and Molten Salt Reactors, instead of the Administration's chosen Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) that the AEC's Director of Reactor Division, Milton Shaw, was appointed to develop."
That seems to be the problem with the liquid thorium design. Yes, it does produce a fissile waste product, Uranium 233; but according to Sorensen, this waste sucks as nuclear bomb fuel. From the Martensen interview once again:
Uranium 233 has never been used in an operational nuclear weapon. It has always been highly enriched plutonium and uranium. And there are some real disadvantages to using Uranium 233 for nuclear weapons, and I think that is why it's never been done and never will be done.
Many of the more traditional nuclear reactors, by contrast, can be used to breed bomb fuel as a part of their cycle. . . which is exactly the opposite of what Ike said needed to happen in his 1953 speech. The Atoms for Peace in practice became the Atoms for War (with a side-benefit of centralized electrical energy sources just to keep up appearances).
So, what if Ike's words were followed a bit more closely and the US had pursued what Sorensen describes as a far more efficient and safe reactor design? Even better, what if we finally follow Sorensen and the company he helped found and give this better reactor at least a try? It won't of course solve all our problems, but nothing in and of itself will. Pursuing a dissensus, a complete divergence from the former operating manual, one built of Cold War priorities and double-speak of the highest order, might be a good first step.
NB: I'm pulling double shifts at work all week, so this is a quickie, full of the flaws most quickies have. If I do further research on this and find it to be full of crap, I'll note such a thing later.