THORIUM 232 - From History to Reactor [2019]

despite the efforts to save energy 2018 marked the year where a primary energy consumption increased by 2.9 percent against 2017 that is almost double the 10-year average of 1.5 percent and all of this was driven by an increased demand for natural gas leading to a 2 percent increase in carbon emissions consumption of coal one of the worst primary fuels for the environment grilled by 1.4 percent or double the 10-year average led mainly by China and India the Energy Information Administration projects that by 2040 the world energy use will rise by 28 percent mainly driven by fossil fuels which represent 85% of all fuels consumed in the world nuclear energy will be the second fastest growing source of energy after solar and wind with an average of 1.5 percent per year although this is good news nuclear is still nowhere near its full potential due to fears raised by disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima but what if we had a nuclear fuel that offers no co2 emissions a fuel that is cheap and produces nuclear waste with a relatively short half-life and is naturally available with enough quantities to provide energy to the entire world for the next 1,000 years Martin trained asthma a Norwegian priest in amateur mineralogist discovered thorium in 1829 but at the time he didn't know what it was and required the help of Baron Jones Jacobs brasilia's who identified and named it after the Norse god of thunder Thor Thorin quickly gained industrial applications in the late 19th century but most notoriously it was used in a very particular experiment that would help understand nuclear decay Madame Curie while working with uranium and researching radioactivity he stumbled upon thorium in her research for other elements similar to uranium she discovered that this new element had similar radioactivity as uranium leading her to realize that thorium was also radioactive and this discovered intrigued many scientists at the time right around then Ernest Rutherford was intrigued by that him and the American electrical engineer Robert Bowie Owens observed that the radiation varied significantly later they figure out that these variations were coming from a short-lived gages daughter of thorium a new element now named radon from 1902 1903 while working with the British physicist Frederick Soddy they observed the decay of thorium into other elements which eventually led to the identification of the half-life as one of the outcomes of alpha particle experiments leading to the theory of radioactivity and the Nobel Prize in 1921 for Saudis formulation of the theory of isotopes as most new discoveries at the time thorium quickly was promoted as a cure for many diseases including diabetes in Romanticism and we all know how that went it was during the Second World War that Glenn T Seaborg while researching nuclear elements realized that thorium was a lousy element to be used in atomic bombs due to its decay chain that would always create elements which significantly decrease its potency on the other hand he realized that he could be used as a nuclear fuel to produce energy since the absorption of one Neutron would transform thorium 232 into uranium 233 which is an element that can sustain a chain reaction but all of this was short-lived since after the Second World War the Cold War began and the race for atomic bombs started interest quickly shifted toward uranium and plutonium accelerating the nuclear agenda the nuclear demise has started with the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and later with Chernobyl in 1986 these accidents almost destroyed the entire industry and after about two decades the industry was started to breathe again and gain traction when in March 2011 Fukushima happened and threw the whole industry backwards again although there was only one death attributed to Fukushima radioactivity fear of what might happen with nuclear power plants always impedes any further development of nuclear technology but thorium essentially offers many advantages in comparison to uranium with virtually accident free power plants to understand that we first need to look into the element itself thorium is a weak radioactive element with atomic number 90 and a half-life of 14 point zero five billion years about the age of the universe although it is one of the rarest metals on earth its availability is much higher and stable than that of uranium 99.9% of this element is encountered as thorium 232 while uranium is mostly found as uranium 238 which is a poor contributor for the production of energy uranium-235 is the best candidate for nuclear power plants uranium reserves are estimated to be about 5.5 million tons but only 0.7 t two percent of that is uranium-235 necessary for the reaction in comparison thorium reserves are estimated to be about 6.3 million tonnes with 99.98% usability and thorium is a special because of one thing in order to become fissile it needs to eat one Neutron transformed into uranium 233 which is the best fuel in the thermal spectrum to achieve that you need to use either uranium 233 or 235 or plutonium remember in the plutonium is a byproduct of nuclear fission and it's readily available in nuclear waste dumps thorium offers a way to reuse the nuclear waste that otherwise would be sitting there for millions of years it can be used in some proposed thorium reactors and at the end of the cycle we would have elements that only need 10 years to decay these elements are xenon neodymium molybdenum Radia strontium zirconium rhodium ruthenium and palladium adding up to about 83 percent of the total waste toxic byproducts are seasoned 137 and strontium 90 whereas cesium half-life is about 30 years that means in about 300 years the radioactivity of cesium is reduced by a power of 10 Leslie under optimal conditions about 1.5 percent of this cycle will produce neptunium to 37 which can either be stored as a waste material or transformed into plutonium 238 to be used by other means just to put this into perspective plutonium the main product of nuclear waste has a half-life of 24,000 years plastic bags decompose in about 1,000 years so not only thorium generates millions of times more energy than conventional energy sources but as byproducts are less harmful to the environment than any other nuclear fuel or in this case even plastic thorium Energy Alliance estimates that in the US alone there is enough thorium to provide power to the country at its current energy level requirements for the next 1,000 years CERN estimates that one ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium or 3.5 million tons of coal let's make a quick comparison thorium can be found in average dirt for every cubic meter of soil you will get on average about two centimeters cubed of thorium that means that you have to refine 42.7 cubic meters of soil to get one kilogram keep in mind that we are considering everything here in optimal conditions and where thorium is abundant with the same 1 kilogram for comparison you get about 8 kilowatt hour from coal 12 kilowatt hour from oil 24 million kilowatt from uranium and about 4.8 billion kilowatt hour from thorium that is enough to power about 460 1583 homes for one year considering a consumption of 10,000 399 kilowatt hour as per 2017 in contrast you would need about 200 kilograms of uranium about 600,000 tons of coal and 400,000 tons of oil to achieve the same power output and the advantages of thorium don't stop there if we consider the power output by area usually a nuclear power plant needs about 3.4 kilometres square of land area for a 1 gigawatt output based on 59 nuclear plant sites in the US we also have to consider capacity factor which in the case of nuclear is about 90% wind has a capacity factor in between 32 and 47 percent while solar has 17 and 28 considering this it means that to achieve the same capacity you need to double or triple the amount of wind turbines or solar panels increasing land area so you end up needing at least 674 to 932 square kilometres for wind and 116 to 200 square kilometers for solar to achieve the same thing this is important because in the case of solar the area that will be covered becomes unusable for any other means hence why using deserts is optimal and then again you have maintenance costs among other problems imagine to replace a third line or solar panel in an area that size thorium reactors are divided into three main parts the chemical processing plant core and power generator one of the main challenges of thorium reactors is the chemical processing part called breeding this is due to the fact that the fuel for the reaction is a liquid hence liquid-fueled thorium reactor LFTR also known as lifter there are many proposed ways to achieve breeding and they can be summarized into three categories single fluid - fluid and hybrid which is a mix of the two each have their own advantages and disadvantages however one of the main advantage of these systems is that once they are perfected if you can flow uninterrupted for many years conventional nuclear reactors are required to be shut down every 18 months for a month at a time the fact that you can run uninterrupted for a long time results in cost savings since there is no downtime and less maintenance required and now let's take a look at the breeding chemical process which is fairly complicated so stay with me one of the main goals of this process is to keep actinides away from other elements so we can maintain the system as pure as possible so along the way many chemicals are removed from the continuous flow all of this starts in the core which is separated into two main parts the outer part called reactor blanket and the inner part called the reactor core moderated with graphite there are two main fluids passing by the core the blanket salt and the fuel salt everything starts in the core with the blanket salt which is composed with lithium beryllium thorium fluoride that receives a neutron from the fuel salt containing lithium beryllium uranium fluoride with uranium 233 or 235 the key here is that only a very small quantity of uranium is necessary to start the entire process unlike the process in conventional solid core reactors to transform thorium into a fissile product it must go through a chemical separation process due to its decay or thorium 232 233 to protect tinium 233 and uranium 233 protactinium-233 is the main concern here because it can absorb neutrons and disrupt the process although some sources state that this step is optional ideally protactinium-233 has a half-life of 27 days and it has to be isolated for a period of at least two months to transmute into uranium-233 this is to guarantee that at least 75% of thorium can be used as a fuel and within to protect tinium half-lives you will get the most out of the system the process can be summarized like this blanket salt comes out of the reactor after being bombarded by neutrons and it passes to the first redox phase going against a steady flow of bismuth protecting you and uranium are removed and the remaining blanket salt flows back into the reactor to keep generating new fuel this process is repeated yet again through another redox column and then reaches the electrolyte cell to be oxidized and turning to fluorides separating them from the bismuth of keeping the cycle going the oxidized protactinium is taken into a tank called decay tank where it is isolated for about two months to get as much uranium as possible at this stage uranium tetrafluoride is still liquid and in order to be removed from the rest of the liquid is introduced into a fluorination column this is possible because uranium is the only element in the mix that can be further oxidized by floor which turns into a gas or uranium hexafluoride at this point uranium hexafluoride is pushed into another reduction column that comes into contact with hydrogen become hydrogen fluoride and uranium tetrafluoride or a liquid again this liquid goes into the reactor and the hydrogen fluoride goes back into the electrolytic cell that splits hydrogen from floor and the cycle keeps going this liquid streams into the third and most important redox column that removes all of the fission products from the liquid leaving no traces of actinides among other fission products now we have uranium being sent to the core for the reaction to take place the core is comprised with graphite tubes where the uranium tetrafluoride flows upwards the graphite moderator plays a crucial role in here by slowing down the neutrons effectively creating more opportunities for fission to happen but also allowing some neutrals to flow through and reach the Blake and thorium fluoride salt hence creating more fuel this is possible due to some sections of the graphite being slightly thinner than the rest in order to allow neutrons to pass through and this is one of the reasons why this system is by far the safest without graphite fission will stop high-energy new have low probability of causing fission essentially for fission to occur graphite as a moderator it slows down neutrons increasing fission probability this is where safety system with a freeze blood comes into play in the event of total loss of power the freeze plug mounts and the core so drains into a passively cold configuration where nuclear fission and meltdown are not possible now from the core fuel salt is pumped into the primary heat exchanger transferring heat to another coolant salt lithium beryllium fluoride which it impasses into another heat exchanging unit with high pressure carbon dioxide the gas used in this tab may differ depending on the lifter model the carbon dioxide moves through a series of turbines and compressors to maximize energy production reaching an efficiency of about 45% solid core reactors efficiency is about 30 and 36 percent although the system seems very complex all of the technology described here is already available and have been tested successfully all around the world however there are a few problems still holding it back there are quite a few aspects of lifter reactors that continue to be a challenge but currently we can call out to the first of course is the development of the fluorination and hydrogen reduction columns and the second one is the ASM II called qualification for a hassle oy n the first problem lies with fluorination this step needs to be precise to keep the breeding ratio high think of it all available neutrons if the required number is matte the chain reaction cannot be sustained however different breeding systems have been tested at a reasonable level and most of the proposed solutions are being explored in reactors around the world corrosion-resistant is also a big problem here the need of high nickel stainless steel enclosure which prevents any sort of reaction with the salt special with fission products requires specific certifications and highly specialized industry to produce which increases the cost of the reactor there are many other issues with this technology however most of them have several solutions in place that have been tested reasonably nonetheless the ultimate problem is acceptance we all know that nuclear energy doesn't have a good reputation and that is reflected in the amount of licensee required to get a power plant up and running especially with no technology in the horizon this might lead into billions and complies cost which is a shame since thorium has a lot of good promises when compared to other forms of energy production I honestly think that we should give a chance to thorium but hey this is just my humble opinion thanks for watching and if you would like more information about this topic let me know in the comments section you

Channel: Subject Zero Science

Views: 456,754

Rating: 4.9209361 out of 5

Keywords: subject zero science, kirk sorensen, nuclear power, nuclear energy, kirk sorensen thorium, kirk sorensen 2019, nuclear energy for kids, thorium reactor, thorium energy, thorium reactor explained, thorium vs uranium, molten salt reactor, nuclear waste, liquid fluoride thorium reactor, thorium (chemical element), graphene technology, graphene strength test, graphene battery, graphene production, graphene processor

Id: biToH42YZZ4

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019

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