Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act of 2008

This interesting legislation has been introduced in the US Senate today by Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Harry Reid, with the intention to amend the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 to provide support for nuclear power generation using thorium nuclear fuel cycles.

It’s said that the thorium deposit in Lemhi Pass, Idaho contains 600,000 tonnes of thorium. Australia’s total identified thorium resources are put at 452,300 tonnes which Geoscience Australia estimates are extractable at less than US$80 per kilogram of thorium.

Just considering the Lemhi Pass thorium and Australia’s thorium reserves, alone, we have 1,052,300 tonnes of thorium available – not to mention all the uranium.

A thorium nucleus has a mass of 232 amu, obviously. Let’s assume that the energy ultimately yielded from each nucleus is 200 MeV, and the thorium is transmuted, and its energy harnessed via U-233 fission, with an overall efficiency within the reactor of 75%, and a further 50% of the energy is lost in a Brayton-cycle engine. Then, we can work out that one tonne of thorium gives about exactly one gigawatt-year of energy.

Current world electricity demand is estimated at a total of about 16,330 TWh. At current consumption, then, this 1,052,300 tonnes of thorium could supply all the world’s electricity needs, all of it, for an astonishing 565 years.

That’s with no use of deuterium or lithium, and effectively no use of natural uranium, or accumulated plutonium.

Food for thought, or thorium for thought, isn’t it?

The text of the bill follows

Reactor safety… nothing if not overzealous.

An amusing photo… from the control room of the historic B-Reactor at the Hanford site.

Green Heretic: environmentalist Mark Lynas investigates nuclear energy.

“Card carrying” UK Green and climate change expert Mark Lynas has been scorned by eco-colleagues for that greatest of big-G Green heresies: Daring to investigate and discuss nuclear energy, in any rational fact-motivated way.

“Except, well, I don’t believe that any more. Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma.”

This investigation of what Lynas has learned, how he’s thought about it, how his views have changed, and how people have responded to him for it, is very much worth reading.

I was going to back up Lynas’ positions by posting this on the discussion thread on his website – but it’s a bit long and I don’t think they will post it, so I’ll post the following here instead.

I will cite or respond to a number of previous comment posts, in chronological order as you read down through the thread: