New Nuclear Causes "Run" on Uranium.

A worldwide emphasis on nuclear power, which indicates the inauguration of 250 new nuclear power plants, to add to the 440 currently operating, has caused a hike in the price of uranium by almost a quarter in the past three months, and a new analysis predicts it will rise by a further three quarters (a doubling overall) over the next two years. To provide the uranium fuel, a host of new relatively small mining and production companies has emerged on the market, and whose share values have rocketed. Britain has murmured in the positive about a new generation of nuclear power stations, in particular as the current family are due for retirement and decommissioning by around 2022, but no firm programme has been described, or even the type of reactors that will be used. It is my understanding that they will be fission reactors based on enrichment of natural uranium in uranium-235, rather than fast breeders, which convert the majority of uranium (uranium-238) to plutonium-239 as a fuel. As I have pointed out in recent postings, this is actually a very wasteful use of uranium, since it "throws away" 99% of the resource (which becomes "depleted uranium"), but there are serious safety issues attending fast-breeders reactors based on uranium/plutonium, and breeding uranium-233 from thorium might be the better way to go.
While uranium remains relatively abundant as a resource, there is less fiscal incentive to adopt an entirely new technology based on thorium, although India with its huge reserves of thorium, is taking serious steps to use this as the fuel for its own nuclear programme. Depending on precise figures, there may be around 70 years worth of uranium resource in current holdings, including the known deposits in Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia, and those in armouries of nuclear warheads, containing heavily enriched uranium (that's 90% uranium-235, not the mere 3.5% contained in nuclear fuel) and weapons grade plutonium (that's pure plutonium-239, free from other isotopes, otherwise a smaller bang is got from a nuclear detonation!). Uranium is ubiquitous at around 2 -3 parts per million of the Earth's crust and soils, particularly those associated with phosphate minerals, can contain from 50 - 1000 ppm (0.1%) of uranium, hence as the price rises, more will be found. The difference between a reserve and a resource, is that the resource is that portion of the reserve which is economically extractable at any given time of writing. As the cost of a commodity increases, then so does the amount of its resource, bearing in mind that other resources, e.g. oil and gas, are used-up in extracting uranium and other fuels, nuclear or not.
The uranium price is forecast to reach $90 per pound by the middle of 2007, and $115 per pound by the end of 2008, according to a report produced by Resource Capital Research. In 2003, the market value of uranium was just $11 per pound. The delay in production at the Cigar Lake mine in Canada means that it is not expected to come on-stream until 2010, which was supposed to account for 40% of all new output within the next three years. A group of 65 new Australian mining firms have seen their shares leap by 53% over the last three months, amounting to a total increase in value of 186% over the past 12 months. Very nice too - I wish I had bought into some of them!
Mining uranium has environmental consequences, beyond those of the nuclear power it is intended to fuel. Friends of the Earth is campaigning against new schemes such as Olympic Dam (also known as Roxby Downs), which by 2013 could become the world's largest producing uranium mine. Mining uranium in Australia is further sensitive because many of the uranium deposits are located on land inhabited by aboriginal groups, and efforts to install a new uranium mine at Jabiluka in the Northern Territories were halted in the light of opposition from environmental and aboriginal groups.

Calculate your Carbon-Footprint.

Ever wanted a ready-reckoner as to your carbon footprint? If so, Donnachadh McCarthy (who's family are originally from Cork, I would think, as it is my Grandmother's maiden name) has written an article in The Independent in which are some handy conversion factors. The carbon footprint is oddly named, since it refers to the "weight" of CO2 impressed on the sky, in tonnes of carbon dioxide NOT carbon. To convert this to an equivalent of carbon, multiply each tonne of CO2 by (12/44) or about a quarter. First of all, electricity. To convert this into an emission of CO2, first work out how many kilowatt hours of electricity has been used by your household during the past 12 months. For our own household, it is 3,062 kwh (according to the electricity bills), and so multiply this by 0.43:

Hence: 3,062 x 0.43 = 1,316.7 kg = 1.3 tonnes of CO2.

Next, gas/oil. Again, from the bills you can work out how many kwh of gas you have used, and in our case that is 18,237 kwh, which is to be multiplied by 0.19, giving:

3,465 kg = 3.5 tonnes of CO2.

[For completeness, If you have oil-fired heating and used 2000 litres of oil, the conversion would be 2,000 x 2.68 = 5,360 kg = 5.4 tonnes of CO2.
If it is coal-fired, and 2.5 tonnes of coal were used, then that equates to 2.5 x 2.42 = 6,000 kg = 6 tonnes of CO2].

Car use: this is worked out on the mileage, and so for an annual 8,700 miles, multiply by 0.36 = 3,132 kg = 3.1 tonnes of CO2. Now, we do not own a car, and instead walk or use public transport for longer distances. Hence although on this basis, our CO2 contribution is zero, there is some output.

Flights. The recommendation is to take the number of short-haul flights (e.g. London-Paris; London-Edinburgh) and multiply by 0.2 tonnes of CO2. For medium-haul flights (e.g. Edinburgh-Ankara; Cardiff-Cairo), multiply by 0.8 tonnes, and long-haul (e.g. London-Sydney) multiply by 2 tonnes.

For the electricity and gas/oil, add the two together and divide by the number of adults in the household. So, for us that is: 1.3 + 3.5 = 4.8/2 = 2.4 tonnes of CO2 each. Add zero for car use, and 2 medium haul flights each (London-Prague) = 2 x 0.2 = 0.4. Hence we have a carbon footprint of 2.8 tonnes of CO2 each. I am relieved that our combined "household emissions" of 5.6 tonnes is less than the 6.2 average according to DEFRA, and a good deal less than the 66 tonnes estimated for one well-off Hertfordshire family! The entire family of Friends of the earth press officer Neil Verlander apparently produces a mere breeze of 1.7 tonnes of CO2!

Energy Balance wishes you all a Merry Christmas and a less energy intensive 2007!

Thorium - Letter to The Independent.

As I reported two postings ago "Thorium gets Good Press over Uranium", I sent a letter to "The Independent" newspaper in response to an article they published on using thorium as a source of energy for the future. That article focussed on Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS), and my point was that thorium could instead be used in a Liquid Fluoride Reactor, to particular advantage, notably avoiding the huge energy cost of running an accelerator system capable of producing an intensely powerful proton beam with which to produce neutrons by spallation, in a lead target. One such accelerator is the "ring-zyklotron" at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, where I have carried out particle beam experiments over many years. The power is huge, and for a beam current of 1.5 milliamps with an accelerating potential of 600 million electron volts (MeV), we have a proton beam running at a power of 900 kilowatts.
Beams of charged particles are steered and focussed down "beam-lines" (steel-pipes pumped out to a hard vacuum) using dipole magnets for bending the beam, and quadrupole magnets (a pair of dipoles in pairs... sort of!) which act as "lenses" to focus the beam. Of course, depending on the polarity of a dipole magnet, the beam is bent (steered) either to the right or to the left, say. After one set-up, a magnet was set the wrong polarity, with the result that instead of the beam passing smoothly down the middle of the tube, it was brought into the wall of it, which immediately vapourised, drilling a hole about the size of the beam-spot - say about a circle 3 cms in diameter - straight through the side of the beam line. I was surprised at this until I worked out the power, and then realised that 900 kilowatts on a piece of metal about an inch across...well, what else would it do but punch a hole straight through it?! Particle beams are not "clean", either, and are contaminated with all kinds of radioisotopes from the "target", which took some time to be cleaned-up before the accelerator and its beam-lines were deemed safe for experimenters to return there!

As the "Inde" have not published that first letter - understandably as there are more immediately pressing issues such as the Ipswich murders in the press, I sent them a modified letter to see if the essential message could be got across with fewer technical details than in the original one. Since the Ipswich case, social policy aspects and the many features pertaining to the Middle East continue to absorb most of the space in the "Letters" section, I'm not sure if they will publish this one either! In any case, I have copied the text below:

I applaud Helen Brown's article "What Energy Crisis" (Wednesday,December 13) extolling the potential virtues of thorium as a nuclear fuel. However, thorium does not "require an accelerator-driven system" (ADS). Such accelerators need huge amounts of electricity to run them, as particle accelerators always do, but in this case are required to produce a beam of protons of such intensity that until 10 years ago the prevailing technology meant that it could not have been done. Rather like nuclear fusion, a working ADS reactor is some way off, and may never happen. However, thorium can be effectively utilised in a liquid-fluoride reactor, where the nuclear materials are present in the form of a solution of fluoride salts. This kind of reactor permits the continuous reprocessing of its nuclear material relatively easily (certainly as compared to solid fuel based nuclear reactors) which is critical in the way thorium is actually used. Details of this and related matters are at http://ergobalance.blogspot.com


Professor Chris Rhodes

No Snow for Santa!

The climate of Northern Europe is distinguished by its lack of winter weather this year, and although midwinter's day has fallen, very little snow has, and spring seems to have already flown to blossom on the roof of Europe. I commented previously on the lack of snow that we noticed on holiday in Switzerland back in August, which appears to be a general feature of the whole of Europe, with knock-on effects for the tourist industry. What are the Alps without snow on them, all said and done?! What is not done without snow, certainly, is skiing and holiday-makers arriving to play their annual medicine of winter sports are being greeted by lush green meadows, on which sheep graze contentedly, not crunchy white virgin pistes. Hotels throughout the Alps remain underbooked, to a loss reckoned by the Italian Hoteliers' Association of £400 million this year so far - and that's just in Italy.
Every spring since 1818, the city of Geneva's official chestnut tree has been watched as a harbinger of Alpine spring, for when it puts out its first bud, by a specially appointed official (sounds like a typical local authority!) who solemnly records the date on a special noticeboard in the town hall (definitely!). There have been two previous "tree" post-holders (how many "human" ones is anyone's guess) and the event usually falls in March, though occasionally it has arrived prematurely in February. This year the tree burst into bloom in late October, and remains to sport flowers and leaves, thereby by-passing winter. Two weeks ago, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that the Alps are especially sensitive to global warming, and in recent years have warmed up by about three times as much as the world as a whole, and that still greater changes can be expected in the coming decades, with less snow at lower altitudes, and receding glaciers and melting permafrost higher up.
The organisation has made a two year study which concluded that 609 from the present 666 (a symbolic number, if there ever was!) medium to large Alpine ski resorts have sufficient snow cover for 100 days a year at the moment, but this number could decrease to a mere 200 if temperatures rise by four degrees centigrade. However, that is the worst case scenario, and does seem an almost outlandish increase. Interestingly, it is Germany that would be worst affected, where a one degree rise - which the "experts" say could happen by 2020... hmmm - would lead to a 60 per cent fall in the number of resorts with snow (more of them at relatively low altitudes, presumably). It is not just the "surface" mountain coverage that is at issue, because ice glues together huge masses of rock which have started to detach from mountains like the Eiger, and entire cliff faces have disintegrated. Smart Swiss-bankers are now refusing to lend money to ski resorts located at altitudes below 4,500 feet.
In Moscow too it is unusually warm at 9 degrees C, rather than the more usual "minus four", and bears in Moscow Zoo show no wish to hibernate. In Sweden, the gingerbread houses that families traditionally make for Christmas are collapsing as the damp, warm weather melts the icing used to stick them together. "The problem is the mild winter," according to Aake Matteson of Anna's, the country's leading gingerbread wholesaler. In Britain, Prince Charles has said that climate change is the "biggest threat to mankind", which is the point made by the government's Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Sir David King, earlier in the year, in agreement with Professor James Lovelock (of Gaia fame), in support of a need for a new generation of nuclear power stations. The Prince has called on governments across the world to act before it is too late. Some think it already is, while others believe that the current global warming is part of a natural 1,500 year cycle, related to the power output of the sun.
In reference to the 53 Commonwealth countries, Charles ("Sir" to me) said that they needed to improve levels of sustainable development. Now he is onto something there, whatever is the cause of global warming. Ultimately, we will have to live and provide energy to do so in a sustainable way; in an eventual "powerdown" strategy that will require a paradigm shift in our relentless pursuit of "more". We still have plenty, but need to use the resources "better" - more efficiently through a combination of technology and some frugality, though less than adopting an entirely agrarian society, as yet. We still need our prevailing technology to develop sustainable methods, holding a programmed and steady course to the self-renewing destination that must be the future.

Thorium gets Good Press over Uranium!

"The Independent" newspaper, published an article last week (Wednesday, December 13th) to which I responded with a letter, pointing out that an accelerator-driven system (ADS) is not the only way that thorium can be used to generate nuclear power, but that it could be used very advantageously in Liquid Fluoride Reactors. The letter has not been printed as yet, and so I have copied the text at the bottom of this posting. Such accelerators need huge amounts of electricity to run them, as particle accelerators do, but these are required to produce a beam of protons of such intensity that until 10 years ago the prevailing technology meant that it could not have been done. Rather like nuclear fusion, the working ADS technology is some way off, and may never happen, although professor Egil Lillestol of Bergen University in Norway is pushing that the world should use thorium in such ADS reactors. Using thorium as a nuclear fuel is a laudable idea, as is amply demonstrated in the blog "Energy from Thorium" (http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/) to which there is a link on this blog (above left). However, the European Union has pulled the plug on funding for the thorium ADS programme, which was directed by Professor Carlo Rubbia, the Nobel Prizewinner, who has now abandoned his efforts to press forward the programme, and instead concentrated on solar energy, which was another of his activities. Rubbia had appointed Lillestol as leader of the CERN physics division almost two decades ago, in 1989, who believes that the cause is not lost.
Thorium has many advantages, not the least being its greater abundance than uranium. It is often quoted that there is three times as much thorium as there is uranium. Uranium is around 2 - 3 parts per million in abundance in most soils, and this proportion rises especially where phosphate rocks are present, to anywhere between 50 and 1000 ppm. This is still only in the range 0.005% - 0.1% and so even the best soils are not obvious places to look for uranium. However, somewhere around 6 ppm as an average for thorium in the Earth's crust is a reasonable estimate. There are thorium mineral deposits that contain up to 12% of the element, located at the following tonnages in Turkey (380,000), Australia (300,000), India (290,000), Canada and the US combined (260,000)... and Norway (170,000), perhaps explaining part of Lillestol's enthusiasm for thorium based nuclear power. Indeed, Norway is very well endowed with natural fuel resources, including gas, oil, coal, and it would appear, thorium.
An alternative technology to the ADS is the "Liquid Fluoride Reactor" (LFR), which is described and discussed in considerable detail on the http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/ blog, and reading this has convinced me that the LFR may provide the best means to achieve our future nuclear energy programme. Thorium exists naturally as thorium-232, which is not of itself a viable nuclear fuel. However, by absorption of relatively low energy "slow" neutrons, it is converted to protactinium 233, which must be removed from the reactor (otherwise it absorbs another neutron and becomes protactinium 234) and allowed to decay over about 28 days to uranium 233, which is fissile, and can be returned to the reactor as a fuel, and to breed more uranium 233 from thorium. The "breeding" cycle can be kicked-off using plutonium say, to provide the initial supply of neutrons, and indeed the LFR would be a useful way of disposing of weapons grade plutonium and uranium from the world's stockpiles while converting it into useful energy. The LFR makes in-situ reprocessing possible, much more easily than is the case for solid-fuel based reactors. I believe there are two LFR's working already, and if implemented, the technology would avoid using uranium-plutonium fast breeder reactors, which need high energy "fast" neutrons to convert uranium 238 which is not fissile to plutonium 239 which is. The LFR is inherently safer and does not require liquid sodium as a coolant, while it also avoids the risk of plutonium getting into the hands of terrorists. It is worth noting that while uranium 235 and plutonium 239 could be shielded to avoid detection as a "bomb in a suitcase", uranium 233 could not, because it is always contaminated with uranium 232, which is a strong gamma-ray emitter, and is far less easily concealed.

The Independent article claims that thorium "...produces 250 times more energy per unit of weight" than uranium. Now this isn't simply a "logs versus coal on the fire" kind of argument, but presumably refers to the fact that while essentially all the thorium can be used as a fuel, the uranium must be enriched in uranium 235, the rest being "thrown away" and hence wasted as "depleted" uranium 238 (unless it is bred into plutonium). If both the thorium and uranium were used to breed uranium 233 or plutonium 239, then presumably their relative "heat output" weight for weight should be about the same as final fission fuels? If this is wrong, will someone please explain this to me as I should be interested to know?
However, allowing that the LFR in-situ reprocessing is a far easier and less dangerous procedure, the simple sums are that contained in 248 million tonnes of natural uranium, available as a reserve, are 1.79 million tonnes of uranium 235 + 246.2 million tonnes of uranium 238. Hence by enrichment 35 million tonnes (Mt) of uranium containing 3.2% uranium 235 (from the original 0.71%) are obtained. This "enriched fraction" would contain 1.12 Mt of (235) + 33.88 Mt of (238), leaving in the other "depleted" fraction 248 - 35 Mt = 213 Mt of the original 248 Mt, and containing 0.67 Mt (235) + 212.3 Mt (238). Thus we have accessed 1.79 - 0.67 = 1.12 Mt of (235) = 1.12/224 = 4.52 x 10*-3 or 0.452% of the original total uranium. Thus on a relative basis thorium (assuming 100% of it can be used) is 100/0.452 = 221 times as good weight for weight, which is close to the figure claimed, and a small variation in enrichment to a slightly higher level as is sometimes done probably would get us to an advantage factor of 250!

However, plutonium is a byproduct of normal operation of a uranium-fuelled fission reactor. 95 to 97% of the fuel in the reactor is uranium 238. Some of this uranium is converted to plutonium 239 and plutonium 241 - usually about 1000 kg forms after a year of operation. At the end of the cycle (a year to 2 years, typically), very little uranium 235 is left and about 30% of the power produced by the reactor actually comes from plutonium. Hence a degree of "breeding" happens intrinsically and so the practical advantage of uranium raises its head from 1/250 (accepting that figure) to 1/192, which still weighs enormously in favour of thorium!

As a rough estimate, 1.4 million tonnes of thorium (about one third the world uranium claimed, which is enough to last another 50 years as a fission fuel) would keep us going for about 200/3 x 50 = 3,333 years. Even if we were to produce all the world's electricity from nuclear that is currently produced using fossil fuels (which would certainly cut our CO2 emissions), we would be O.K. for 3,333/4 = 833 years. More thorium would doubtless be found if it were looked for, and so the basic raw material is not at issue. Being more abundant in most deposits than uranium, its extraction would place less pressure on other fossil fuel resources used for mining and extracting it. Indeed, thorium-electricity could be piped in for that purpose.
It all sounds great: however, the infrastructure would be huge to switch over entirely to thorium, as it would to switch to anything else including hydrogen and biofuels. It is this that is the huge mountain of resistance there will be to all kinds of new technology. My belief is that through cuts in energy use following post peak oil (and peak gas), we may be able to produce liquid fuels from coal, possibly using electricity produced from thorium, Thorium produces less of a nuclear waste problem finally, since fewer actinides result from the thorium fuel cycle than that from uranium. Renewables should be implemented wherever possible too, in the final energy mix that will be the fulcrum on which the survival of human civilization is poised.

Here is a copy of the text of my letter to The Independent:
:
I applaud Helen Brown's article "What Energy Crisis" (Wednesday, December 13) extolling the potential virtues of thorium as a nuclear fuel. However, thorium does not "require an accelerator-driven system", it can be utilised to particular advantage in a liquid- fluoride reactor (a specific example of a molten salt reactor), where the nuclear materials are present in the form of fluoride salts dissolved in a solution of other fluoride salts. This kind of reactor permits the continuous reprocessing of its nuclear material relatively easily; certainly as compared to nuclear reactors which use solid fuel. This factor is critical in the way thorium is actually used, because the material must first be converted to protactinium by neutron irradiation from a fissile kick-starter element (e.g. plutonium), and then isolated from neutrons (by removal from the reactor) allowing this to decay to uranium-233. The U-233 is then introduced to the reactor to undergo nuclear fission and consequent energy production.

Professor Chris Rhodes.