SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future (MacSci)

Well worth the time it took to read

Great book on the missed opportunity of liquid fueled Thorium reactors. It is a shame that more is not being done to fully research this type of reactor.

Good intro into the subject. I just wish a few decision-makers around the world had the insight to understand this fuel cycle.

I will be short on this review - sadly, this book partially failed my expectations of a truly scientific read on the use of Thorium as a future nuclear fuel. The author pours it on thick with the global warming hype, "Outside of the right wing of the Republican Party, hardly anyone today questions the worldwide scientific consensus...". At that paragraph, the book makes it hard for a reader to focus solely on proven science - besides, all you need to do is go to Google and type in "1000 international scientists against global warming" to know this is not settled science. Regardless, wade through the needless expounding on carbon emissions and humans killing a planet, and you will find a truly remarkable piece of scientific and historical work.

Martin does what all novelists need to do to make a truly good point - start with the very beginning of the subject and build the background so that everyone understand how we have gotten where we are. He has done an excellent job of uncovering the preeminent scientists that discovered the forked road of Uranium or Thorium. Further, he clearly explains how the Uranium path was chosen through the lenses of Rickover vs Weinberg. A part of me figuratively bled for Weinberg as he struggled to keep the MSR technology alive, despite all that was against him.

All in all, I would have given this book 5 stars had Martin held back on his climate change credentials in such an in-your-face manner. However, I will not penalize it with a 1 star solely on that basis.

I wanted to understand 1) why we have this new technology and 2) why isn't anyone funding it; the author covered both of these topics very well and with great brevity.

The rest of the world is going to be using this cheap abundant and safe fuel. With the importance of a green energy source necessary to continued growth of the economy why is the country that developed the liquid thorium reactor giving other countries a head start in applying this technology. These reactors can also be used to create power from the nuclear waste of the uranium reactors which is a huge problem that will last thousands of years if not converted to usable power in a thorium reactor.

Superfuel was an interesting read. There is a lot of informative background information on the past and present of nuclear power and related subjects. Still, in all seriousness, I have to caution against staking too much on any of its conclusions. Here are some things I feel compelled to set straight:

p 16: "Way back in the 1970s, I took a course at Yale called 'The Physics of Energy.' The first assignment was to calculate how big a solar plant, in an ideal sun-drenched location like the American Southwest, would be required to supply 90 percent of U.S. electricity demand at the time. I'll spare you the calculations, but the answer was 'roughly the size of the state of Arizona.'"

First, why would Martin spare us the calculations, when it's basic arithmetic? Are we just supposed to take his word for it?

I will not spare the calculations, and they go like this:

—US electric generation (1985) (TWh): 2700 TWh (from BP statistical review of world energy (2015)) (about 7.4 TWh per day)
—average insolation for Arizona (NREL map (they have a whole set of maps, including separate ones for PV and concentrated solar)): about 6.5 kWh/sq meter per day. (This is an average, so the capacity factor is already taken into account.)

Let's suppose PV system efficiency is 10%. (These days I think we can do much better, but in the 1970s Martin could be excused for using a more pessimistic figure—although, as an engineering student, he should have expected efficiency would improve by now, as it has.)

—Our net available solar energy should be 0.65 kWh/sq meter per day.
—Area required is 7.4 X 10^12/0.65 X 10^3 = 11.4 X 10^9 sq meters = 11400 sq kilometers.
—Area of Arizona is: 295234.
—So a good estimate is that 3.9% of the land area of Arizona could provide 100% of the electricity demand of Arizona in 1985. For 90% in the 1970s, I don't have exact figures, but a decent estimate might be 3.0–3.5% of the land area. Martin is off by a factor of about 30X.

Note that this is for electricity alone, not total energy. Actually, about a third of Arizona's area could supply the total global energy need, if you used energy at the present rate, but all as electricity, and if you could get the electricity to where it was needed with no loss.

I have been encountering these outlandish estimates of the land needed for solar energy every since the 1970s, when I first started noticing the issue. For whatever reason, they never go away.

Just before that, Martin says: "The IEA has projected that new nuclear power plants will produce electricity for approximately $72 per megawatt-hour…Electricity from onshore wind farms will cost up to $94 per megawatt-hour."

—So? This is a big difference? Martin doesn't say what year those IEA numbers are for, but if the numbers were accurate at the time, they have probably tipped well in favor of wind by now, considering the rate at which wind power is expanding. So much for Robert Bryce's "unassailable numbers."

BTW I doubt if N2N refers to baseload power alone, as Martin puts it; I expect that the idea is for natural gas to serve a "peaking role," filling in for the fact that nuclear cannot quickly be ramped up to follow sudden increases in demand.

Also on p 16: "…the local utility in Austin, Texas…announced in early 2009…that it would spend $180 million dollars on a 30-megawatt solar plant. Officials said that the new sun farm would run at an average of 23 percent of capacity, producing power at a construction cost of $6000 per kilowatt of capacity. Thus, Austin Energy has agreed to build a solar plant that will operate about one-fourth as often as a nuclear plant and cost about 25 percent more on a per-kilowatt basis," Bryce scoffed.

—As with the wind example, 25% more is not very significant, and the difference has probably been more than reversed by now, as fast as things are evolving. IAC it's not said whether that cost includes storage. If so, then it's wrong to say the solar plant operates one fourth as often as the nuclear plant. With the storage, it's probably actually more reliable than the nuclear plant; and the difference could be significant: When a nuke plant goes offline, it takes a huge amount of electricity off the grid, usually a gigawatt or more, and for
a period not known in advance. The solar plant, by contrast, will at least be generating something pretty much from sunrise to sunset, every day, with rare failures; and if there is a failure, it'll be small, taking out only a small part of the generation.

Furthermore, $6000 is not realistic for solar these days on a peak kilowatt basis; I believe the BOS (balance of system) cost is more like $1500, and that probably includes storage. Bryce implies that solar is 4X the cost of nuclear per kWh, and that's just not anywhere near true, unless you're talking about some special situation (Greenland, maybe?)

p 65: "Despite a few notorious accidents (Three Mile Island, Fukushima-Daiichi) and one genuine disaster (Chernobyl), the overall safety record of nuclear power is quite good."
—Sorry, I can't just let that pass. Three Mile Island and Fukushima are not genuine disasters?! I'm pretty sure the utilities, which lost billions and lots of credibility, would acknowledge them as *huge* disasters. I'm not sure, but some may even have gone to jail over Fukushima. And of course, it's always quickly said that, well, after all, no one actually died at Fukushima from the radiation, though thousands were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. A lack of deaths directly from radiation might be true, even when cancer risks are accounted for, although that might be hard to prove. (And BTW cancer is not the only health risk from radiation, but let's not go too far afield right now.) Let's just suppose that's true. There was a mass evacuation, and thousands, probably many thousands, suffered terrible hardship from that. Do you really think no one died due to the evacuation? But what if there was no evacuation? Might there not have been deaths from radiation? *You can't have it both ways.* There's tremendous uncertainty with nuclear risks. That's what makes it so terrifying when you're in the middle of an event like that. If things did not go as badly as some feared, does that mean their fears were irrational?

BTW there have been numerous other serious accidents:

"One survey found that 63 nuclear accidents (defined as incidents that that resulted in either death or more than $50000 of property damage) have occurred worldwide from 1947 to 2007. The study documented that nuclear plants ranked first in economic costs among all energy accidents, accounting for 41 percent of energy accident related property damage from 1907 to 2007 (or $16.6 billion)." [7 billion of that was for Chernobyl.]
—The Dirty Energy Dilemma (p 35), (citing Benjamin Sovacool, "The costs of failure: A preliminary assessment of major energy accidents, 1907 to 2007," Energy Policy 36, no. 5 (May 2008), 1802–1820)

Saying that no one has been killed (excluding the special case of Chernobyl, of course) due to nuclear power involved a little sleight of hand. For example, the book *The truth about Chernobyl* mentions, in a long list of various nuclear accidents, a 1986 event at Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, where a tank, containing radioactive gas at a uranium enrichment plant, exploded, killing one person and injuring eight. That has to be considered part of the safety record of nuclear power, if that enriched uranium was partly or totally for power plants. Things like that can easily slip through the net of the discussion, because they are from radiation. In Japan, in 1999, there was a criticality accident at the Tokai fuel fabrication facility, Hundreds of people were exposed to radiation, and two eventually died from it. Deaths in uranium mining also should be counted, whether due to health effects of radiation, or directly from accidents. Again, the figures may be small compared to coal, but surely not zero.

One more nit that should be corrected, though it's not that important, is on page 84: "…powered by electrical [sic] motors…submarines had changed little since World War I.
—Submarines, are, of course, still powered by electric motors. (There have been experiments with magneto-
hydrodynamic drives and the like, but AFAIK nothing like that has been put into use.)

A fair position on thorium molten-salt reactors IMO is that there should be development work on them—after all, there are likely to be situations someday where they are indispensable, where they may be the only good option. (Outposts in the outer Solar System come to mind.) It may also be a good idea to shift toward smaller, standardized designs. But it took something like 50 years of experience for LWR nuclear power to develop into a fairly mature industry, with its 90% up-time and predictable costs. Some new-generation advocates seem to think they can just short-circuit that previous learning curve, and in a decade or two they can be cranking out LFTRs on assembly lines, and bury them in the ground unattended for the next 30 or 40 years. I think that's a fantasy, at least without a much longer timeline. LFTRs may be very useful eventually, but I wouldn't rely on them too much just yet.