SUPPORT FOR RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THORIUM NUCLEAR POWER
This needs serious consideartion. Renewable energy will not meet need, thorium LFR is a tried and tested technlology,. It has advtages over pWR systems in useful by product,size, safety,non proliferation and resource to power it.
John Davies
shared this idea
5 comments
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Anonymous
commented
I'm all for it
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Colin Megson
commented
For the UK, LFTRs are 30,40,50 years away. PRISM technology is here and now! The UK could lead the world. Vote for this:
http://38degrees.uservoice.com/forums/78585-campaign-suggestions/suggestions/3400202-nuclear-waste-can-be-burned-to-provide-all-of-the- -
Ed Brown
commented
HELL YEAH. Im so behind this.
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J the C
commented
I'm a huge Thorium fan. This is well worth the votes.
Also worth noting that there are some other similar campaign suggestions:
and
Worth being aware of - divided votes make the overall Thorium campaign less likely to succeed!
For anyone who doesn't know, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LTFRs), also called Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) are the forgotten siblings of 'modern' nuclear technology. They were invented and successfully tested in the 1950s, and were recommended by the scientists who developed them as being a far superior choice for civilian use; they were safer, smaller, cheaper, more efficient, and they had no serious weapons-proliferation problems - making the Bomb using one of these reactors is so technically complex (and the resulting weapon inferior), any nation capable of it would find it easier to start their own weapons program from scratch anyway.
But the US military cut the project and went with uranium-fueled water-moderated reactors for all applications, because that design produced weapons-grade plutonium in its nuclear waste, and the priority of the day was making more warheads than the USSR. These 'Boiling Water Reactors' (BWRs) and more advanced 'Pressurised Water Reactors' (PWRs) are basically weapons-production reactors that've been adapted for power generation. Fuel efficiency is a woeful 1% in the very best models (the remaining 99% becomes high-level radioactive waste); by contrast LFTRs could burn nearly all the fuel, leaving very little waste.
LFTRs use a liquid fuel, and thus cannot suffer a meltdown - there are no solid fuel rods which can melt.
They do not require active cooling, as Fukushima did - if the reactor starts overheating, a solid plug in the reactor melts, and the liquid fuel drains under gravity into a glorified radiator that cools it down without any outside help, and stops the nuclear chain reaction.
The fuel and waste effluent is not soluble in water and is chemically stable - if the reactor leaks, it leaks salt crystals which, even at high temperature, stay where they fall rather than burning into the atmosphere and spreading.
LFTRs are such a massive improvement over current nuclear technology it's practically insane that only China and India are seriously engaging in engineering and design work on their own commercial models, considering the US ran a test reactor successfully at Oak Ridge for several years in the 1960s before funding cuts forced its shutdown.
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Inuit
commented
LFTRs are not pressurized, create a smaller amount of waste that is easier to handle, and can be made walk-away safe. Along with other nuclear reactors, they provide a very low carbon and very reliable source of energy.
