Environment & Energy

...that it's in Denmark, that offshore oil and gas drilling little country that has been antinuke heaven.

I believe there is a role for thorium; it's certainly available from the mine tailings of the lanthanide mining industry that all of our antinukes ignore, much as they ignore the tragedy of cobalt mining, phosphate mining in the Western Sahara and so on...

From my perspective the only sustainable fuel for the length of time that humanity exists is uranium put into a fast spectrum. This is because uranium is slightly soluble in seawater and in ground water (where it is a constituent of NORM, naturally occurring radioactive materials) where health consequences occur. Thorium is by contrast, far less soluble, although the mined thorium dumped by the lanthanide miners might well support humanity for centuries.

From my perspective, the best use of thorium is in a ternary fuel in CANDU type reactors, consisting of reactor grade plutonium, depleted or once through uranium - the latter being slightly preferable owing to the presence of ²³⁶U which does not occur naturally on Earth anymore - and thorium. This converts heavy water reactors of the CANDU type into breeder reactors that will capture the value of ²³⁶U as well as making the uranium in used fuel, "pre-enriched" after removal of neutron absorbing fission products, via the generation of ²³³U, ²³⁴U and ²³⁵U.

Thorium is, in my view, subject to a fair bit of over enthusiastic hype. We need to put the vast amount of uranium, mostly now depleted already mined to use. This requires the fast spectrum, or, more slowly in terms of doubling time, the fuels described in the previous paragraph.

If I have a chance I may write a brief post here on another of the thousands of papers on uranium adsorption that came up recently, mixing nanotechnology and amidoxime resins, from a recent issue of Industrial Engineering and Chemistry Research. We don't actually need to obtain uranium this way for the time being, but it will clean up NORM impacted ground water, and in some cases, river water, as well as agricultural run off contaminated by uranium carried from phosphate ores.

As for James Hansen, he's a very old man who has done his share. He's exhausted, I'm sure, and deeply pessimistic about the future of humanity as he has every right to be. His efforts on behalf of humanity in supporting nuclear energy will stand up well in history, should humanity survive the use of fossil fuels, about which antinukes couldn't care less.