Bill Gates Is Beginning To Dream the Thorium Dream 327
Daniel_Stuckey writes "TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered the most attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But Terrapower just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too."
Good! Now go read up before laughing this off! (Score:3, Informative)
You'll need to start at the beginning of the entire nuclear reactor concept. If you can find it, and it will take a little digging, you'll stumble upon a paper and subsequent decision from 1947-49. In it, the reactor lead engineer who also worked on some of the first nukes, stated we now have 'an endless supply of cheap energy' from a Thorium reactor design.
Now why wasn't it implemented? It did not produce enough byproduct plutonium for nuclear bombs.
Hopefully, they'll pull all of the detractors of Thorium kicking and screaming into the future, because this tech. needs to be fully explored and ultimately implemented.
I'd cite, but I'm on a phone. Sorry...
Norwegians are already on it (Score:4, Informative)
Thor Energy [thorenergy.no] started a trial [extremetech.com] earlier this month.
Turns out that Norway has one of the world's largest thorium deposits, which is part of the motivation. I guess having huge oil deposits, hydro-energy resources, and wind-energy resources wasn't enough...
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
I saw an announcement recently about thorium fuel elements [world-nuclear-news.org] being loaded into a reactor for long-term engineering research to see how they perform physically. There's not a great demand for thorium fuel cycle operations at the moment though when uranium is so cheap [uxc.com] and plentiful.
Re:Finally! (Score:1, Informative)
but all of that kind of seems piddling compared to the effect his actions will have on billions of the world's poorest people. I have been forced to grudgingly admire him for quite some time now over his philanthropy and the transparency and effectiveness of his charity compared to some of its "rivals."
Well then you haven't been paying attention.
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission. For example, in Africa, The Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron. These firms have been responsible for much of the pollution causing respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.
The Gates Foundation also has investments in 69 of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical. It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and The Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.
Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of transgressions including forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.
In the mean time, Bill Gates' net worth has increased by $20 Billion since 2007.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
The missing phrase in my post here is decrease in, it was not an oblique reference to Windows virus infection rates.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
The bit about decommissioning costs being paid for by the government is a lie. Nuclear power plants in the West build and maintain a reserve fund to pay for end-of-life decommissioning, usually based on a percentage of the cost of the electricity generated and sold. In the US that's 0.1c to 0.2c per kWh IIRC.
Government taxpayers only pay for decommissioning non-power reactors such as the ones used to make weapons-grade cores for bombs etc. Decommissioning power reactors is paid for by the electricity consumer in the end. This isn't particularly onerous -- France's electricity consumers pay about 13c Euro per kWh for their nuclear generated electricity and that includes a decommissioning levy. Germany's electricity generated by lignite coal and Russian gas and a small amount of renewables costs twice that much to the consumer while it emits nearly twice as much carbon per kWh generated.
As for construction costs being paid for by the governnment, that's untrue as well -- there may be loan guarantees from a given government but those loans to pay for the upfront costs of building the reactors are commercial financial instruments, meant to be paid off over forty years and more of the reactor operating and generating sellable electricity. I don't actually know of a Solyndra-style billion-buck default on a loan guarantee for a nuclear construction project.
You are correct about the cost of fuel being a minor part of nuclear operations though. Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, so cheap that major sources can't be economically exploited yet since they're in very remote areas of the world and getting them to market would be more expensive than they're worth.
The research into using thorium is very long-term. Centuries from now when uranium becomes scarcer thorium might become the go-to non-carbon fuel but right now it's only an interesting laboratory curiosity.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
only *exact quoted text* is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
The Gates connection is an idiotic myth.
No, the connection is wrong only as far he didn't literally say "ought to be enough for everyone".
That the correct quote:
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
yup, he admit that he had a part in designing the 640k limitation and admits that he though at the beginning that it shouldn't be problematic, but the realised the error later.
Yes it was due to the design of the original PC, which used 640k for RAM and the rest for video & BIOS.
The 8088/8086 processor used in there machine has no such limitation. (Hint: 640k isn't a power of two, so very likely, it isn't a bus limitation. The bus is 20bits, meaning that it can address spaces up to 1MB).
The 640k is purely an arbitrary choice. You have to put the non RAM parts (ROM, Video ram, etc.) somewhere in the address space.
The most prevalent way to do it back then is to put this part in a fixed range at the beginning of the address space, and then put the ram afterward. That's the way it was designed on most home micro computers.
IBM and Microsoft (per Bill Gate's own admission) collaborated in the designing of the PC architecture. Surprisingly, they did NOT follow the prevalent way. They opted to sereve the address space 00000-9FFFF for RAM and A0000-FFFFF for the rest. (That's where the 640k come from: it's the first address with a hex "letter" instead of "number" because that the arbitrary point they choose for the RAM/ROM split).
Had they chosen to go for the most prevalent way, problems would never had arisen, the upper simply being pushed as newer CPUs with wider buses became more widespread.
But, IBM though of the PC as a glorified terminal with which to talk to their big irons. They didn't see much interest in providing much RAM. The important part was their minicomputers and mainframe, and those DID have more provision built-in. ...except it wasn't. If they were paying a little bit more attention to what was happening around them, they might have thought a little bit better and thought of a design which doesn't put a restriction on memory.
Microsoft on their side, came from a background of 8-bit home micro computers, in which 64k was huge.
As Billy said, 640k could seem to them as being more than anything ever needed. They could write software running inside 64k. The PC could even ship with incredible amount of RAM like 128k. Why would anyone need addresse of more than 640kb.
Also the first PC were equiped with amounts of RAM varying between 16k and 256k - so it was not "640k of RAM, then BIOS" but more like "a few kb of RAM, a huge unused gap in the address space, then BIOS" - given the huge gap, the address split might have looked reasonable...
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Most if not all decommissioning is paid for over the reactor's operating period. Some funds are not fully paid up yet as the reactors have only been operating for a decade or two or three. By the time they get shut down the funds will be paid up and a bit more probably.
Decommissioning an undamaged reactor isn't that expensive. It might take a few decades but nearly all of that will be waiting for some residual radioactivity to decay after the last load of spent fuel is removed. The rules about residual radioactivity are ridiculously tight in the US -- "scrap steel from gas plants may be recycled if it has less than 500,000 Bq/kg (0.5 MBq/kg) radioactivity (the exemption level). This level however is one thousand times higher than the clearance level for recycled material (both steel and concrete) from the nuclear industry, where anything above 500 Bq/kg may not be cleared from regulatory control for recycling." Weird isn't it? It's like folks are irrationally scared of nuclear power for some reason.
The operators pay for the waste storage and treatment too with another levy on the electricity generated. In the US that's about 0.1 cents US per kWh IIRC. The spent fuel, being nuclear material and therefore regarded as strategic is entrusted to the government to deal with. The total fund for dealing with the spent fuel is over 30 billion bucks and rising.
Finland's current fund for dealing with its spent fuel is well over a billion bucks, raised similarly by a levy on the generating companies. They're spending about 800 miliion bucks building an deep underground depository in granite that should handle a century's worth of spent fuel from their existing and planned reactors, with operating costs covered by the levy paid for by the electricity consumers.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the richest uranium deposits known are in northern Canada, in locations so remote they'd have to fly the yellowcake (uranium oxide in the form of U3O8) out in cargo planes. Today the spot price (25th July 2013) for yellowcake is $40 per lb. which makes it uneconomic to work that ore body given the logistics costs involved. If the price of yellowcake tripled then maybe it would start to be worthwhile opening up those orebodies. That tripling of the raw material price would only increase the price of nuclear-generated electricity by about 1.5 cents per kWh though because the fuel is still ridiculously cheap and a minor part of the total cost of nuclear electricity.
Long time back before WWII, nobody was really interested in uranium, it had little or no industrial uses. After WWII everybody started looking for it but it was thought at that time it was rare hence the early interest in thorium, breeder reactors etc. It turned out that it was actually quite a common substance with lots of easy-to-mine ore bodies in places all over the world. We're still working on the easiest to extract sources of uranium because they're cheap. As they run out we'll dig up more expensive ores, lesser grades requiring more digging and processing and the price will rise.
The wonderful thing is that uranium is so compact a source of energy that we don't need to dig up a lot of ore to keep the lights on, not compared to coal or oil or gas. The US' entire electricity demand could be met by a couple of million tonnes of uranium ore each year, without reprocessing spent fuel -- if that was done (at a price) a few hundred thousand tonnes of ore would suffice. In comparison it would take about 4 billion tonnes of coal each year to do the same job.
The bottom line price for uranium is extraction from seawater -- Japanese experiments suggest that would cost about $300 per kilo of uranium metal although nobody's bothered to build a pilot extraction plant because, guess what, uranium is so cheap right now it's not financially viable to even try. There's enough extractable uranium dissolved in the world's oceans to power the world for millenia if we had to.
Re:The point of thorium is no plutonium. (Score:5, Informative)
Power reactors didn't produce weapons-grade plutonium anyway. PWRs and such salt the Pu-239 they breed from U-238 with Pu-240 when it captures another neutron and that screws up implosion weapon designs to the point where they don't work right if at all. There were some dual-use reactor designs like the British Magnox and the Russian RMBK-4 that could be operated to breed purer forms of Pu-239 but by the time they came on-line in the 60s the major Powers had made all the Pu-239 (a few hundred tonnes in total) they'd ever need from dedicated short-cycle breeder reactors in places like Hanford and Windscale. You don't need reactors at all to build U-235 weapons of course, just enrichment facilities.
The good news is that molten-salt thorium reactors work by breeding Th-232 into U-233 and that can be easily extracted and turned into quite usable nuclear weapons (the US fired off a couple of test U-233 shots in the 50s, I don't know if the Soviets ever did). Given that a molten-salt thorium reactor positively requires a reprocessing plant which can extract the U-233 to keep it running is just another bonus for any wannabe new entrants to the nuclear weapons club assuming molten-salt thorium ever gets productionised.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Thorium doesn't use fuel rods, so it doesn't need the zirconium, etc. The thorium is simply dissolved in the molten sodium fluoride.
The main reason it was abandoned in the US is that it was single-use, civilian power only, not dual-use military-civilian. You can't power a submarine with a thorium reactor and you can't build bombs from its waste products. It produces very little waste, a small fraction of what uranium-cycle reactors produce.
Uranium would be in short supply (Score:4, Informative)
The market now may not be tight, but the world's total supply of U-235 is very small. Plus it takes vast amounts of energy to refine it out of the ore, since over 99% of the uranium is U-238. And if I understand the process correctly, it's refined by making it into UF6, which is spun in a chain of centrifuges. Now how do you make UF6? With FOOF! Look that one up... fluorine dioxide. Nasty.
If we really tried to power the world's electric supply with U-235, we'd soon run low. (Or die from meltdowns.) But there's a virtually infinite supply of thorium. It's not just cheap; it's practically free, since it's a waste product of rare earth mining, and we need to refine tons of neodymium in order to have good magnets for motors and generators. Yes, the MSBR needs a seed of U-233, but enough of those reactors do exist.
Re:only *exact quoted text* is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Erm.
The IBM PC, PC/XT has an 8088 (or clones with 8086's) that has a 20 bit address bus. It's still a megabyte, no matter what.
It doesn't matter where you put the BIOS - beginning or end. It's still a megabyte.
The BIOS is up the end there because the 8088 reset jump vectors are at the end of RAM, not the beginning (like the Z80, etc.) So you need to have something at that memory range for the CPU to start executing.
The 8086/8088 software interrupt vectors are at the beginning of your address space. So, there needs to be RAM there. The interrupt handler, NMI handler and all the software vectors can't be in ROM - well, they can be, but then they'd have to jump to RAM at some point to do anything flexible.
So, you:
* need RAM in the first 4k for jump tables and such (0x00000000 -> 0x00001000) .. so, the IBM PC memory map makes sense.
* need ROM at the end for the reset/power-on vectors
The IBM PC architecture also assumed people would build ROM add-on applications, like BASIC (which they did) but also word processors, spell checkers, etc. That's why there's 8 ROM slots on the PC and PC/XT. But people soon adopted disk applications rather than ROM applications.
So, I don't buy that "it's Gates' fault." The only things I can see he could've done differently are:
* advocate a 68000 CPU - but then he'd have issues at 16MB - and Amiga/MacOS had exactly that
* add more RAM and less peripheral address space - but you're still capped at 1MB
* advocate for an EMS (page-flipping) architecture early on, and encourage people to make use of it.