World’s First Thorium Reactor Designed

India’s forward-thinking attitude has established the country as the leader in thorium reactor development. But can India put its long-term plan into reality? Now, their AHWR design is finished, taking them one big step forward.

The reactor is equipped with passive shutdown systems, core heat removal through natural circulation, emergency core coolant system (ECCS) and gravity-driven water pool (GDWP), a large tank of borated water on top of the primary containment of vessel. It can operate for 120 days without operator - that’s 4 months without anyone controlling it. And did we mention the design life: this reactor will last some 100 years.

The plan is to have a 300MW prototype in operation by 2016 and then expand thereafter. By 2050, thorium should meet 30% of India’s electricity demand.

The completion of the AHWR design is an important step towards reducing the import of fossil fuels and combat climate change.

To learn more about India’s Thorium Energy Program, have a look at their three presentations from ThEC13 in Geneva below, which contain a wealth of information (click on the title to see the slides as you watch the video):




India’s New Prime Minister Briefed at BARC
28 July, 2014
India has been making advances in the field of thorium-based fuels, working to design and develop a prototype for an atomic reactor using thorium and low-enriched uranium, a key part of India's three stage nuclear power programme.



The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, paid his first visit to Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) in Mumbai last week. He was briefed by Dr. R.K. Sinha, Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy and other top officials and scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre on India's atomic energy programme; DAE's extensive research and development and education programmes; and DAE's contributions in other areas such as healthcare, especially cancer treatment, food security, solid waste management and water purification.


India has been making advances in the field of thorium-based fuels, working to design and develop a prototype for an atomic reactor using thorium and low-enriched uranium, a key part of India's three stage nuclear power programme.

Prime Minister expressed his strong appreciation for the extraordinary achievements of Indian scientific community in one of the most complex and challenging fields of science and technology. He said their success was especially creditable because it took place in the face of decades of international technology denial regime; India's self-reliance in the nuclear fuel cycle and the commercial success of the indigenous reactors demonstrated that with vision, resolve and hard work, India could be a front ranking country in the most challenging fields.

Prime Minister reiterated his belief that energy security, which was increasingly based on clean and reliable sources of energy, was the critical driver of India's rapid and sustained long term development. He saw an essential role for nuclear energy in India's energy strategy, given the scale of demand in India.

Prime Minister assured the DAE of his full support in the implementation of DAE's ambitious expansion programme and expressed hope that DAE would meet the target of increasing the capacity by three times from the present level of 5780 MW by 2023-24 within the projected cost. He underlined the importance of ensuring that nuclear energy remained commercially viable and competitive with other sources of clean energy in the long run. He also asked DAE to continually upgrade technology, both with regard to our long term plans and international trends. DAE, he said, must also plan for ensuring adequate availability of skilled human resources in the country.

He hoped that the role of industry in providing equipment and systems for the nuclear programme would continue to grow and recognized that adequate incentive structure should exist to facilitate that. He noted that we would need to tap additional sources of investments for our ambitious expansion programme. He welcomed India's growing international partnership in the field of nuclear energy and hoped for timely implementation of the ongoing projects in a manner that they met the requirements of techno-economic viability and safety standards. Technology transfer to India, he observed, was a vital element of his vision for international partnership in India.



LInk

Ово није LFTR, већ AHWT, гориво није течно.

 

Те смајлије стављаш кад немаш шта да кажеш, или...?

Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly.

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CANDU Nuclear Power Plant at Qinshan, China
Image via Wikipedia

For the past several months, a friend of mine has been telling me about the potentially game-changing implications of an obscure (at least to me) metal named Thorium after the Norse god of thunder, Thor.

It seems like he is not the only person who believes thorium, a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, could provide the world with an ultra-safe, ultra-cheap source of nuclear power.

Last week, scores of thorium boosters gathered in the United Kingdom to launch a new advocacy organization, the Weinberg Foundation, which plans to push the promise of thorium nuclear energy into the mainstream political discussion of clean energy and climate change. The message they’re sending is that thorium is the anti-dote to the world’s most pressing energy and environmental challenges.

So what is the big deal about thorium? In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:

What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.

A clutch of companies and countries are aggressively pursuing Dean’s dream of a thorium-powered world.


Lightbridge Corporation, a pioneering nuclear-energy start-up company based in McLean, VA, is developing the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor in collaboration with Russian researchers. In 2009, Areva, the French nuclear engineering conglomerate, recruited Lightbridge for a project assessing the use of thorium fuel in Areva’s next-generation EPR reactor, advanced class of 1,600+ MW nuclear reactors being built in Olkiluoto, Finland and Flamanville, France.

In China, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and a clutch of Chinese outfits began an effort in mid-2009 to use thorium as fuel in nuclear reactors in Qinshan, China.

Thorium Resource Potential

Thorium is more abundant than uranium in the Earth’s crust. The world has an estimated 4.4 million tons of total known and estimated Thorium resources, according to the International Atomic Energy Association’s 2007 Red Book.

The most common source of thorium is the rare earth phosphate mineral, monazite. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 12 million tons, two-thirds of which are in India.  Idaho also boasts a large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals.


Thorium can be used as a nuclear fuel through breeding to fissile uranium-233.  For those technically-inclined readers, here is a geek-friendly explanation of what that means:

Although not fissile itself, Th-232 will absorb slow neutrons to produce uranium-233 (U-233)a, which is fissile (and long-lived). The irradiated fuel can then be unloaded from the reactor, the U-233 separated from the thorium, and fed back into another reactor as part of a closed fuel cycle. Alternatively, U-233 can be bred from thorium in a blanket, the U-233 separated, and then fed into the core.

In one significant respect U-233 is better than uranium-235 and plutonium-239, because of its higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. Given a start with some other fissile material (U-233, U-235 or Pu-239) as a driver, a breeding cycle similar to but more efficient than that with U-238 and plutonium (in normal, slow neutron reactors) can be set up. (The driver fuels provide all the neutrons initially, but are progressively supplemented by U-233 as it forms from the thorium.) However, there are also features of the neutron economy which counter this advantage. In particular the intermediate product protactinium-233 (Pa-233) is a neutron absorber which diminishes U-233 yield.

I have no idea whether thorium is the panacea many people claims it is likely to be, but I believe we’ll be hearing more about it in the years to come.

UPDATE: If you want to know more about Thorium, the person to ask is my fellow Forbes contributor – and resident nuclear energy expert – Kirk Sorensen.  Check out Sorensen’s work here:  http://blogs.forbes.com/kirksorensen/

Sorensen: What do you think about Thorium?  I am among the many Forbes readers I believe are eager to know what you think.  So?

Индијски реактор треба да буде први комерцијални, не први уопште, у свијету их је изграђено петнаестак. Друго, створио си забуну, њихов реактор не користи течно, већ чврсто гориво, а разлика између то двоје је велика. Дакле, о чему желиш да се прича?

Thorium

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