| Nuclear As Pollution Answer – Thorium Safer and Cleaner | 24 November 14 |
The world will use up its budget to keep global warming below a level that averts the most severe climate change by 2040 as emissions from oil, natural gas and coal will rise about 20 percent, the Paris-based agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook report published today. Nuclear power has helped cut the equivalent of two years of emissions at current levels since 1971, it said. One of the three elements widely considered useful in the generation of nuclear energy, thorium is three to four times more plentiful than uranium and is widely distributed in nature. To use it in a nuclear reactor, thorium must absorb neutrons, a process that eventually converts it to an artificial isotope of uranium, uranium-233. In a Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR, pronounced “lifter”), the reactor vessel contains two types of liquid-fluoride salts. One, the fuel salt, holds the fissile fuel (U-233) that sustains the nuclear reaction. The other, a blanket salt, has enough thorium to absorb about half of the neutrons from fission and produce more U-233. Thorium power generation benefits could be even greater if it is used in molten salt reactors (LFTRs), which can act as eco-cleaners to burn up old toxic waste. Radioactive fission products can also be re-added to the reactor for successive rounds of power generation, making energy generation cheaper. In the event of power-loss, a plug in the base of the reactor melts and the salts flow into a containment vessel to cool down, stopping the reaction and any radiation release.
View November 12, 2014 Bloomberg article |
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