"What garbage…a Thorium reactor needs an accelerator like a fish needs a bicycle."

Posted on June 12, 2011 by admin • Posted in Advocates, education, Kirk Sorensen, LFTR, nuclear, nuclear plants, recycling, reprocessing, thorium, uranium • Tagged "Waste", ADTR, energy awareness, fission, generation IV, LFTR, Nuclear Advocates, nuclear energy, nuclear physics • 2 Comments

This is Kirk Sorensen’s comment on his Facebook group page EnergyFromThorium which has encouraged 60 interesting responses.

Energy from Thorium

What garbage…a thorium reactor needs an accelerator like a fish needs a bicycle.

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15 hours ago · · · Share

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- Cavan Stone
  
  Every scientist has their obsession, for those who tried to go into particle physics most have found that the problems there are best described as being akin to trench warfare. The accelerator crowd is probably made up of the folk who realized just how bleak particle physics is and need to get out. However the particle physics remains their true love and to make this problem “interesting” they over-complicate it by contorting the design to include their true love. One thing many scientists are guilty of is seeing their one true love as a golden hammer and everything else as a nail. I now I have fallen into this trap sometimes.
  
  15 hours ago · · 2 people
- Energy from Thorium
  
  ‎”‘This means the margin of safety is far greater than with a conventional plant,’ says Cywinski. ‘If the accelerator fails, all that will happen is that the reaction will subside. To stop the reactor, all you would have to do is switch off the accelerator.’”
  
  More mistakes from this ignorant fellow. If you walk away from any reactor with a negative temperature coefficient it shuts down without intervention, and that includes LWRs, LFTRs, and any other Western-licensed reactor.
  
  15 hours ago ·
- Adam Burke Oh hey, they cover my point right here:
  
  ‘In fact,’ says Cywinski, ‘you’d probably need two or preferably three accelerators for each plant.’ One reason is that each accelerator would need regular maintenance.
  
  ‘You can’t just switch them on and expect them to work continuously for ten years.’
  
  15 hours ago ·
- Energy from Thorium
  
  ‎”And if hit by an earthquake, he adds, even one as powerful as the one that wrecked Fukushima, a thorium plant would be ‘intrinsically safer’. ‘There’d be some residual radioactivity heating the core, but sustained nuclear fission would simply stop. Everything would cool much faster. You’d be left not with potential catastrophe, but just a heap of molten metal and metal oxides.’”
  
  I’m actually embarrassed for this fellow. Fukushima’s reactors shut down immediately after detecting the quake, LONG before the tsunami reached the plant. It was the WASTE HEAT that melted the fuel elements and EXACTLY the same problem exists in their design. If they knew nuclear engineering they would know this. I hope the British government examines just how little this man knows about nuclear engineering before he gets any funding.
  
  15 hours ago · · 1 person
- Energy from Thorium
  
  ‎”In a letter to Cywinski, he admitted the science behind thorium reactors was ‘well based’, and said the main reason he couldn’t recommend government support was because there had never been research on how to reprocess thorium fuel ‘on an industrial scale’.
  
  But this, says Cywinski, totally missed the point: not only would thorium plants produce far less waste, but their fuel – which would only need to be refreshed every ten years, as opposed to 18 months in a conventional nuclear reactor – wouldn’t need to be reprocessed at all.
  
  ‘This is a one-time fuel cycle,’ Cywinski says. ‘It’s yet another of thorium’s attractions.’”
  
  No, it is Cywinski that misses the point entirely, without recycle of bred U-233 into the reactor, there is no point in using thorium. One of the things we discovered at last year’s ThEC2010 conference during the accelerator-driven presentations was just how little thought had been given in their reactor design to fuel elements, cooling, power conversion systems, reprocessing, safety…you know…all the real elements of a reactor design.
  
  They were thoroughly obsessed with telling you every little detail of the least important component of the system–the accelerator.
  
  15 hours ago ·
- Cavan Stone
  
  That’s what physicists tend to do, obsess, and well I hate that the level of science funding has gotten to the point where everyone is in crisis mode, and its every-man for himself. Even though I would wish there’s funding available for these accelerator guys to stick with building accelerators, the politics right now will only tolerate research with immediate payoff so for them its find an immediate payoff or die. What they are advocating right now is a sub-optimal mismatch of technologies, and of course props to EFT for calling them out on that.
  
  14 hours ago · · 1 person
- Cavan Stone
  
  I would also say to these accelerator guys: “What the hell are you doing trying to get into Thorium, especially when you have Proton Cancer Therapy literally starring you in the face?” It simple you go the public and say hey we got this accelerator that we can zap more energy into the cancer and worry less about zapping the healthy stuff. For crying out loud they can do cancer research and the research in this area is highly promising. If you can’t sell promising cancer research you shouldn’t be in the business of writing grant proposals.
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Energy from Thorium My favorite part of ThEC2010 was listening to the gal from Aker tell us about how the “accelerator-driven, subcritical reactor” would incorporate a control rod to hold it 0.5% subcritical so that the accelerator would have something to do. It was pretty hard to suppress a laugh at that point at the utter Rube-Goldbergian-ness of the whole idea.
  
  14 hours ago · · 3 people
- Energy from Thorium
  
  ‎”Possibly because there remains a powerful vested interest in the ‘old’ uranium nuclear industry, this commitment hasn’t yet been matched by the UK Government. But according to Cywinski, ‘we shouldn’t be asking whether we can afford to invest in this technology. We should be asking whether we can afford not to.’ Like oil and gas, uranium is a finite resource, and its cost is already rising. Some economists estimate that by the middle of the century, it will be prohibitive.”
  
  Sorry man, if the United Kingdom does absolutely nothing at all with your accelerator research it will have no bearing on whether or not it can realize the promise of thorium. You’ve tried to connect two things that have no real reason to be connected, for your own advantage.
  
  14 hours ago · · 1 person
- Bram Cohen Do the accelerator-driven designs not use a freeze plug? If they don’t, that’s insane, and if they do, that raises a serious question as to what the whole thing is doing. The freeze plug is a lot more reliable than a computer-controlled accelerator is.
  
  14 hours ago · · 1 person
- Cavan Stone
  
  I am a guy who loves particle accelerators. They are great devices, awesome devices, that provide phenomenal data for basic scientific research and they are highly effective at treating cancer. The people that research these areas do really significant work. However I am totally with you on this. Although if I may add something, I would say “you know what accelerator guys, we’ve called you out on this. Prove us wrong. Show us how in comparison to all the other thorium ideas, why your accelerator driven system delivers the best performance, because right now I am just not seeing it.” Nothing would make more happier for high energy physics to have them prove you and me wrong. However right now I just don’t see that happening.
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Energy from Thorium No Bram, the accelerator-driven designs typically feature solid thorium fuel elements and a liquid-metal coolant, which makes them as unsafe as a fast breeder reactor and removes the central advantage of thorium: thermal breeding.
  
  The advocates spend about 99.5% of their time looking at the accelerator for the reactor and 0.5% looking at everything else.
  
  14 hours ago · · 2 people
- Energy from Thorium Cavan, we did exactly what you say at ThEC2010 for a whole day and heard nothing from the accelerator people. They couldn’t defend their idea and scarcely tried.
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Energy from Thorium I’m having no luck posting on the article on the Daily Mail, anyone else having problems too?
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Cavan Stone ‎@EfT Oh well sorry accelerator guys, that’s just how science works. Its a cruel mistress who doesn’t care about how strongly in love you are with your own idea, you either double-down, struggle, fix whats wrong or you give up, go home, and cry yourself to sleep.
  
  14 hours ago · · 1 person
- Aaron Keskitalo Why… Why in the hell does a nuclear reactor need an accelerator? What on earth could that possibly accomplish? It’s like spraying a river with a garden hose.
  
  14 hours ago · · 7 people
- Energy from Thorium Aaron, that’s a fantastic analogy, mind if I steal it?
  
  14 hours ago · · 3 people
- Aaron Keskitalo Sure
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Cavan Stone ‎@Aaron pure genius!
  
  14 hours ago ·
- Emerson Ford
  
  An accelerator would be more vulnerable to large scale seismic events than any of the other systems. If the shockwave overcomes the stabilization equipment, the beam could be thrown out of alignment, magnets could fracture, and cryogenic coolant lines could be broken. Any of those could cause major damage to the accelerator, leading to expensive repairs or damage so severe that the reactor would have to be pulled permanently.
  
  However, from the standpoint of the people manufacturing and repairing the power systems, such a high maintenance platform is EXTREMELY profitable. One of the myriad reasons that electric vehicles are taking so long to become main stream is electric vehicles are inherently more durable than vehicles using a combustion engine. The LFTR system is to the Accelerator system as the electric car is to an SUV.
  
  13 hours ago · · 2 people
- Rick Maltese By the way at the Equinox Summit in Waterloo Ontario there were two individuals Yacine Kadi and Jakob Sogard pushing the IFR and the Accelerator Driven Thorium reactor as the most likely candidates to be the next generation of new nuclear reactors.http://wgsi.org/blog/behind-closed-doors mentions it.
  
  13 hours ago ·
- Bram Cohen Yeesh, do they have any explanation as to why their system is superior to a conventional fast breeder reactor, or why an accelerator couldn’t be applied to a conventional fast breeder reactor? Thorium’s fuel cost may be a rounding error, but a conventional fast breeder’s is only slightly higher, and fuel cost isn’t the biggest issue for even ordinary once-through plants anyway.
  
  13 hours ago ·
- Bram Cohen It took me a minute to realize how profoundly true the ‘spraying a river with a garden hose’ analogy really is.
  
  13 hours ago · · 2 people
- Scott Phillips Article Snippet: Cywinski and Nuttall are members of ThorEA, the Thorium Energy Amplifier Association, a coalition of experts from several British universities and research institutes. The type of thorium plant they want to build is effectively ‘proliferation-resistant’. Cywinski says, ‘It just wouldn’t produce material you could weaponise. You could happily sell it to Iran or North Korea.’
  
  12 hours ago ·
- Scott Phillips ‎… http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=61572583059
  
  12 hours ago ·
- Scott Phillips Like i said… Energy problems gone forever…
  
  12 hours ago ·
- Scott Phillips ‎… http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=679611918
  
  12 hours ago ·
- Robert Steinhaus
  
  I think Cavan expressed it well; trying to marry a particle accelerator to a Thorium Reactor is a sub-optimal mismatch of technologies. A LFTR is a much less expensive and practical approach for generating real power for communities that need it.
  The accelerator mentioned in the article “EMMA” is only capable of accelerating electrons (20MeV). This is far short of what would be needed to produce energetic protons to use with a spallation target to produce neutrons that could drive an ADS system. A great deal of difficult nuclear engineering would have to be done to allow Non-scaling fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators to be connected to Thorium fission reactors to produce real energy.
  Particle accelerators are low reliability devices, and designing accelerators into systems that are designed just to produce energy is not something that a nuclear engineer would choose to do (it would might take a real physicist or perhaps a chemist like Dr. Carlo Rubbia to be this audacious).
  
  11 hours ago · · 1 person
- Adam Freidin Robert, while I don’t understand what you just said but the point is well taken. Accelerator = Complicated.
  
  11 hours ago ·
- Emerson Ford With another generation of material advancement, and a major innovation in energy harnessing technology, an accelerator reactor could be miniturized down to the point where it could be used to power vehicles. Although, in my opinion, such a system would more likely be a fusion reactor utilizing Boron-11 and hydrogen protons, not the Thorium fission cycle.
  
  11 hours ago · · 1 person
- Adam Freidin ‘You’d be left not with potential catastrophe, but just a heap of molten metal and metal oxides.’
  
  Hahahahaha *cries*
  
  11 hours ago ·
- Michael Michalchik Perhaps not necessary, but who knows it might have advantages.
  
  10 hours ago ·
- Suzie Sheehy The whole point is that the reactor with an accelerator would be sub-critical. I agree thorium would be a great way to go without the accelerator-driven side of things, but the accelerator driven subcritical reactors have a lot of inherently nice features.
  
  9 hours ago ·
- Suzie Sheehy
  
  I see I’ve commented on a thread with a lot of people who know a lot about thorium reactors, but very little about politics. Sorry darlings, you’re not going to to sell the idea of a critical reactor right now. You just can’t divorce the public’s ideas of a critical nuclear powerplant with Chernobyl & Fukushima. Besides, the assumption that “these guys” spend 95% of their time working on the accelerator is just completely wrong. I too am not sold on the necessity of having an accelerator system to generate power (the accelerator, for the record, is probably the least developed part of the system right now due to the very high power & high reliability requirements) – what I think is a REALLY good idea though is having an accelerator driven system for transmutation of the nuclear waste from existing powerplants. Particularly in the US where they have nowhere to put their waste this is fast becoming a necessity. The advances in technology (particularly for the accelerator side) that this research will bring about is not JUST for the ADSR concept but will help to improve the general reliability of accelerators for cancer treatment applications (and yes, this is a HUGE application right now for the disparaging person who asked why the research isn’t sold on these grounds).
  
  9 hours ago ·
- Suzie Sheehy Sorry, one more: these guys are selling your cause as well. They want to see thorium reactors in any guise. Accelerator-driven or not.
  
  9 hours ago ·
- Bill Moore
  
  I do not necessarily agree with the arguments for the accelerator option, the LFTR does seem better to me. I HAVE to make one comment in it’s defense however: It could be politically/conceptually more palatable to the general public…”Oh, you just have to flip a switch and turn off the accelerator. Well, that sounds simple and safe.” Granted, it is sad that we have to consider that, but it could help usher in an attitude of acceptance of thorium. We should, of course continue to pull for LFTRs, but the accelorators could be an early step in that direction.
  
  8 hours ago · · 1 person
- Daniel Ruppert ‎@Bill Moore: I prefer not even having to flip a switch, since most errors are made by humans. Reactor designs like LFTR with their freeze plug CAN be switched off with a “switch-flipping” but they also switch themselves off if anything goes wrong.
  I agree with Suzie Sheehy that the public doesnt accept critical reactor designs right now – which is only again a proof of how ignorant people actually are.
  
  8 hours ago ·
- Verita Nuda Oppps my bad.. Was not thinking straight Lord Dr Robert Winston (typical Labour stooge) . Oddly enough I cannot seem to find that video now on youyube.. Hmmm wonder if I have it lying around somewhere.. It’ll make you want to cringe.
  
  7 hours ago ·
- Verita Nuda Ahh found it.. !!!! Wow.. talk about LFTR rising in the rankings. You can’t do a search not for Thorium Reactor without coming across LFTRs Fantastic!!! anyway.. here it is.. and boy is it slick.. but TOTALLY misses the point. An ADSR Reactor they call it
  
  7 hours ago ·
- Verita Nuda ‎”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mJtONjE14”
  
  7 hours ago ·
- Richard Mathews A liquid fluoride reactor won’t need an accelerator and there are more reliable ways to produce thermal neutrons for solid thorium reactors.
  
  6 hours ago · · 1 person
- George Carty I mentioned LFTR in the comments, but I’m getting loads of “dislikes” — I wonder why?
  
  6 hours ago ·
- Gene Herron ‎”Thorium atoms only start to undergo fissile nuclear reactions and thus to release their energy when they’re bombarded with neutrons, and these would have to be supplied by an external source – ultimately, an accelerator.”
  
  Ultimately this paragraph is patent non-sense.
  
  5 hours ago ·
- Tom Owen Don’t knock it. It’s building the “Thorium:Safe” brand image. And if you start worrying about the tabloid press…
  
  5 hours ago ·
- Gene Herron The reason was that a thorium reactor is effectively useless at producing material for weapons.”
  
  This isn’t true either. The US has tested weapons from U-233 derived from Thorium. Teapot MET per Wiki.
  
  Wasn’t very effective but it worked. 22Kt device is nothing to sneeze at it.
  
  4 hours ago · · 1 person
- Chris Huang-Leaver It’s in ‘The Daily Mail’ the paper that supported Hitler back in the day. Does the article mention Lady D BTW?
  
  4 hours ago ·
- Adam Freidin The last thing we need is some accelerator driven accelerator to suffer some sort of meltdown (or even have the public educate themselves in the possibility of a meltdown!). The inherent safety is in MSR, not thorium, and I would feel dirty letting ADSR help sell thorium safety.
  
  3 hours ago ·
- Robert Steinhaus
  
  It should be more widely understood that practical subcritical designs, like Dr. Carlo Rubbia’s ADS, operate at a keff (neutron multiplication factor) of 0.95 or greater because even the largest accelerators available (football field size SRF linear accelerators) are not strong enough to operate any further from full criticality. Most of the ADS designs actually propose to operate at keff of about 0.99, so an expensive and unreliable accelerator only manages to produce a subcritical reactor that is subcritical by a totally measly amount (0.01). Accelerators of the class needed are equivalent in cost to a full commercial LFTR (around $2 billion dollars) and they would consume about one third of a commercial LFTRs power (~300 MWe) output to operate.
  Yet in the technical press, Thorium LFTR and Thorium ADS are featured as being about equal in standing as future prospects. To this old relic of America’s strategic weapons field test program, there is no comparison between LFTR and ADS, with LFTR being by FAR the better and more practical concept that would safely and cost effectively produce power.
  
  2 hours ago · · 3 people

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