Economic Factors of Liquid Fluoride
Thorium Reactors
Rob Morse
January 2013
1
Elevator Speech
I want to build a Thorium reactor to make money. These reactors produce safe, clean and
cheap electric power.
We ran a Thorium reactor in the 1960s, but then we stopped. Regulations have changed, and
new development takes money. No investor will bet a billion dollars on a politician’s promise
to let us license this type of reactor.
These reactors are safer than existing plants.
Thorium reactors operate at low pressure, about the same pressure as your car tire.
They can’t have a steam explosion because they don’t need water to stay cool.
These reactors are passively safe, which means they will safely shut down all by themselves if
you walk away from them.
Thorium is the wrong nuclear fuel to make an atomic bomb.
One important difference is that liquid fueled Thorium reactors make almost no nuclear waste.
Outline
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Elevator Speech
Cost Structure
Nuclear Background
LFTR Application
Discussion
A Source of Heat
 Man’s progress is that we now harnesses
nature rather than enslave our fellow man.
 We learned to make heat from fire, and convert
that heat to mechanical motion, and to convert that
motion into electricity. From electricity we can do
almost anything. Nuclear power, and Thorium
reactors in particular, are simply another source of
heat; an inexhaustible source of heat.
Thorium in, Electricity out
An Efficient Design
An desirable nuclear design
requires a balance of factors.
•Intrinsic safety
•Little or no radioactive waste
•No bomb materials
•Low cost per power delivered
•Small physical size
•Power on demand
•A wide choice of building sites
6
Capital costs of existing plants
Capital is 60 percent
of the costs.
 Plant design and
regulatory approval
 Plant costs (the
building grounds)
 Equipment costs
 Staff training
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Reduce capital costs
Buy a power plant off the shelf, one that
requires little maintenance and can be
brought online quickly.
Natural gas fired turbine-generators are an
example of such “plug and play” power
systems.
Fuel for a lifetime?
You consume a ball of coal
10 meters in diameter…
…or a ball or thorium 37mm in diameter.
9
Nuclear History
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Your “lifetime of energy” is a ten meter ball of coal, or a golf ball of Thorium.
Your nuclear waste is the volume of two or three grains of rice.
The LFTR reactor is a Thorium 232 - Uranium 233 reactor.
This reactor uses a liquid fuel.
The liquid fuel is chemically inert at all temperatures and solid at room
temperature.
The reactor core acts as a nuclear catalyst. This has a huge safety benefit.
The reactor operates at atmospheric pressure because the fuel does not boil.
The reactor can operate at high temperatures (650 to 850C).
The reactor is given new fuel as the old fuel is consumed rather than carrying
several years of fuel in the reactor at one time.
Nuclear waste products can be removed on a continuous basis.
The reactor is walk-away-safe.
The Thorium found in nature is isotopically pure, versus 0.7% for Uranium.
Because the fuel is pure, the reactor produces much less nuclear waste than
conventional power plants; 97 to 99 percent less waste.
The waste is different in kind and should be “non-radioactive” in about 300
years.
How hard is it to make a 300 year repository?
Nuclear History (continued)
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We built a liquid fueled test reactor in the 1960s to power an airplane. We
even flew a reactor in an airplane. After that, the military and research
branches of the government killed the liquid fueled reactor in favor of solid fuel
(uranium).
Thorium is about as rare as lead or tin.
We currently treat Thorium as undesirable waste. We have a thousand year
supply of Thorium in one mountain on the Montana-Idaho border.
We do not need a massive containment building designed to retain a steam
explosion. We could use a thin steel shell to isolate one environment from
another.
We don’t need a river to cool this reactor. We can cool it with air and put it
anywhere.
Plant size is determined by regulatory costs rather than technical constraints.
The current implementation of LFTR is a 100 MW unit (comparable to a large
jet aircraft or navy DDGs)
It can be delivered in pre-assembled modules by truck and erected in weeks
rather than years.
It can be built on an assembly line like an aircraft or ship.
It will cost a billion dollars to license a Thorium reactor. That is the cost of the
permission slip, not the engineering. No one wants to place that bet in the US.
Old technology
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Forecast
 The country who builds LFTR will have an
enormous economic and environmental
advantage over their competition.
 The US military might build LFTR if our
politicians don’t drive us into regulatory collapse.
 China recently opened a large dedicated
research facility for LFTR development.
 Environmental politics would have to change to
build LFTR in the US.
Implementation
 Build a non-nuclear sub-scale model with an
electrically heated core.
 Simulate operations with non-nuclear fuel.
 Refine the design for total life cycle costs.
 Design the manufacturing line and the plant.
 Build a sub-scale plant of the prototype design.
 Build and test the beta plant modules.
Discussion Questions
 How do the technical features of LFTR change
financial risk?
 What happens when you can put a plant
anywhere?
 What if you can deliver it in weeks?
 What if you can pick the plant up and move it to
another location?
 What if nuclear spent fuel is a source of medical
isotopes and rare earth materials?
 What if the biggest cost is regulatory approval and
licensing?
Appendix
Search the web for-
Thorium Energy Alliance
Energy from Thorium
Elevator Speech
We want to build a Thorium reactor to make money. These reactors produce safe, clean and
cheap electric power.
We ran a Thorium reactor in the 1960s, but then we stopped. Regulations have changed, and
new development takes money. No investor will bet a billion dollars on a politician’s promise
to let us license this type of reactor.
These reactors are safer than existing plants.
Thorium reactors operate at low pressure, about the same pressure as your car tire.
They can’t have a steam explosion because they don’t need water to stay cool.
These reactors are passively safe, which means they will safely shut down all by themselves if
you walk away from them.
Thorium is the wrong nuclear fuel to make an atomic bomb.
One important difference is that liquid fueled Thorium reactors make almost no nuclear waste.
Where and how would you build a plant?
The plant doesn’t need a massive building to contain a steam explosion.
Thorium reactors don’t need to sit next to a river or ocean for cooling. They can be installed
almost anywhere.
Thorium reactors can be much smaller than a regular power plant. They could fit on a tennis
court or parking lot.
The power plant can be built on an assembly line like an airplane or ship. They don’t have to
be built on site like a huge building.
These small power plants could be delivered by truck and installed where they are needed in
weeks, not years.
We’ve already found a thousand years supply of thorium here in the US.
Walk-Away Safe
Size matters!
Your nuclear waste is the size of a few grains
of rice!
LFTR wo Equations. Thorium
power conference, Oct 2009
20
Lets Make Power
 This is a picture of the waste heat coming from the original LFTR test
cell.
 The heat transfer fluid (molten salt) is at low pressure.
 We can use a gas cycle, like a jet engine, at high temperature.
– This means they can have high efficiency, a 50% reduction in power
rejected to the environment per power delivered to the electric grid.
 These plants can run at partial load.
LFTR wo Equations. Thorium
power conference, Oct 2009
21
Chart of the Nuclides for LFTR
Fissile Fuel!
Ref: http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/nudat2/reCenter.jsp?z=90&n=142
Uranium (92)
~27 days half-life
Protactinium (91)
~22 min half-life
Thorium (90)
Raw
Material!
+N
Contrast Uranium and Thorium
 0.7 % of Uranium is fissionable. The rest
becomes nuclear waste.
 Thorium is isotopically pure and converted
to U233 for fuel.
 For fuel cycle side-reactions seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
LFTR Processing Details
Metallic Thorium feed stream
Bismuth-metal
Reductive
Extraction Column
Pa-233
Decay Tank
Fluoride
Volatility
233UF
6
7LiF-BeF2
Uranium
AbsorptionReduction
Pa
Recycle
Fertile Salt
Recycle Fuel Salt
7LiF-BeF -UF
2
4
UF6
Hexafluoride
Distillation
“Bare”
Salt
Fission
Product
Waste
Return
Core
Blanket
232,233,234
Vacuum
Distillation
Fertile
Salt
Two-Fluid
Reactor
xF6
Fluoride
Volatility
Fuel Salt
MoF6, TcF6, SeF6,
RuF5, TeF6, IF7,
Other F6
Molybdenum
and Iodine for
Medical Uses
Metal Reduction Column
Myth of Half Life
 What makes a radioactive material dangerous?
– Even low energy beta decays can break organic bonds.
 Is a material with a 1 second half life dangerous?
– It is very dangerous..today. Tomorrow it is inert.
 Is a 15 billion year half life dangerous? (Half of it
has decayed since the big bang.) It has a very low
activity, and we used it for hundreds of years.
 How about a thousand year half life? It is both
active and persistent.
Myth of Creating Radioactivity
 If radiation is dangerous then we should do
what we can to eliminate it from the
environment. That is exactly what nuclear
reactors do. They are the nuclear analog to
chemical catalysis reactors; they accelerate
natural processes.
 The only way to “create” nuclear radiation is
with particle accelerators. Conventional
reactors simply accelerate decay towards
stable elements.
Myth of Concentration
Thorium and uranium are dispersed in nature.
We concentrate them, and so concentrate
their natural toxicity. They decay naturally.
For safe disposal, should we re-disperse
them and lower their effective activity, or
sequester them and decrease our contact?
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
http://www.scribd.com/doc/59204103/Thorium-presentation-GreenEnergy-Forum-2008-07-25
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/resources.html
http://moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/NAT_MSBRrecycle.p
df
Thorium in 5 minutes (remix video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
Binding energy