Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum

(reordered your statements for my convenience)



I was answering arcs_n_sparks' contention that nuclear doctrine is not always made by rational people in the previous comment.

As I alluded to above there is a tendency to create a bogeyman out of the image of "the madman with an A-bomb" and see it as a potential reality to be feared and controlled for. The truth is that such a character can only be found as a dramatic construct in novels, and screenplays. In fact dictators work within policy making infrastructures filled with people that are not mad, nor do they want to see their privileged station lost because of the whims of the guy in front.

I was not suggesting that minor nuclear Powers are necessarily isolated.



While I don't necessarily agree that this would be the best course of action it underlines the point that the whole issue of nuclear proliferation is far too complex to be solved with ether some quick technical fix to power reactor design, or by attempting to institute unworkable or unenforceable international controls on trade.

This has been the thrust of my entire argument - if some country is going to make a pest of itself with nuclear weapons (or for that mater with biological or chemical weapons) the only effective way to stop it is to apply military force. Trying to control traffic in technology or material is a lost cause, as the attempts to interdict the flow of narcotics has amply demonstrated, and the only real impact will be a negative one on legitimate trade.

Making narcotics is easy.
A few post ago, you explained that making weapons-grade material is an extremely complex and expensive proposition.
Ergo, limiting availability of weapons-grade material is not only desirable, it is also relatively much easier than narcotics.
It also helps if the number of proliferating regimes is reduced.

It does appear that in most cases "the only effective way to stop it is to apply military force" -- though one could argue that South Africa, Argentina and Lybia were exceptions. As we all know, in the latter case, it was the demonstration of military force against Sadam Hussein that brought results with Khadaffi.
Time will tell how Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il are eventually dealt with....

Nevertheless it has not stopped any country with the will from doing so.



I disagree, it's not easer than stopping narcotics as events have shown, for one thing international controls cannot be enforced on domestic supplies of uranium. There isn't an open market now for weapons grade material, all of the countries that have weapons programs had to make their own from scratch or from illegally obtained material. Existing treaties (like NPT) make trafficking in this stuff and the technology to make it illegal and yet...

This is what I am worried about: more controls will only limit legitimate trade without stopping black market operations WHICH ARE ALREADY CONTRARY TO INTERNATIONAL LAW. As it stands it is almost impossible to stop trade in all enabling technology anyway without halting global trade outright. In William Langewiesche's book, The Atomic Bazaar the author makes a point of showing that most of the technology acquired by A.Q. Khan was obtained on the open market, and that the concept of 'dual use' is just too nebulous to be effectively applied.

I'm not saying that a country can't be stopped from fabricating nuclear weapons, I am saying that it cannot be done without military intervention. Short of that once a nation has decided that they need nuclear weapons (and this is not a choice made lightly) they will mount a program until they are physically stopped, or the need for these devices disappears.



South Africa destroyed its nuclear weapons of its own accord, because after the regime change there was no longer a need for them. They were expensive to maintain and served no military purpose for that country. The Argentine and Brazilian programs again were halted by internal decisions because it was determined there was no need. None of these were due to international law being enforced in any way. Note too that these are very large self-sufficient countries that cannot be easily pressured by diplomatic means should they chose to start again. NPT supporters can pat themselves on their backs all they want over these as success stories, but the truth is international feelings on this have very little to do with these countries giving up their programs.

Lybia of course had already got a taste of what happens to pissant little States that make annoyances of themselves. I am sure that this weighted on Khadaffi's mind when he was told to stop what he was doing. The threat of military interdiction, is the same as doing it, only shots aren't fired. Iran is a case in point, WMD or no WMD their asperations to nuclear weapons came to an end with the invasion.

Yes, this is definitely a risk that should be addressed.
As we are both Canadians, we are well aware of the case-in-point of US HEU sold to us for the purpose of medical radioisotope production -- and the idiots in Washington who want to put a stop to it, ostensibly on the grounds of non-proliferation -- which of course is a load of BS.

But it does provide a good illustration of the failure of many people to differentiate between peaceful democratic nations, and beligerent regimes -- irrespective of whether they seek nuke weapons or not.
We have made some progress on this front recently however, with the rescinding of pariah status for India.
Just as a note of historical fact, South Africa never actually had functioning nuke weapons, as they were missing the neutron initiators required for HEU devices :


Of course you mean Iraq, not Iran.

Yes, I was aware of that but it isn't germane to the point I was making.

As I understand, the figure of 680 million Rand is an underestimate because the very energy intensive enrichment method they were using was not costed in properly, and too I understand much of the funding was hidden in the conversion, enrichment and fuel manufacturing services for Koeberg.



Of course I did <slaps hand to head>

Khadaffi's daughter was killed in a U.S. bombing mission, despite no help from the French. Khadaffi came to realize he was touchable. That is what it takes to get irrational individual's attention: you point a gun at their head and have demonstrated you are willing to pull the trigger (versus just talk about it, like what much of diplomacy does). There are people in the world that only understand that equation; everything else is just talk, and they'll keep doing what they are doing as you spew words and U.N. Security Council resolutions in their direction.

From:RRW For CTBT? Obama’s Zero Nukes Play @Science & Global Security

DV82XL, your posts have been fantastic on this topic. Thank you!

High praise indeed; you are most welcome.

This is a subject that has always made me see red, I guess because coming from a nation that has a lively nuclear sector and doesn't have a weapons program, I can hardly believe it when my own countrymen blithely offer this worn out adage that nuclear power leads inevitably to nuclear weapons. I have had several very animated discussions on this subject over the years, to the point where now I can feel my long-suffering wife's stare boring into the back of my head from across a room full of people if the conversation strays into that territory.

What set me off was the unquestioned belief that India used their CANDU power reactors to breed Pu for their weapons program, and calls from Canadian antinuclear groups to stop export of this technology, claiming Canada was 'one of the worse proliferators on the planet'. Worse this lie about CANDUs was circulating outside Canada, and being repeated as an unquestioned truth.

The truth is that India used a pool type reactor based on AECL's NRU, with enriched uranium and heavy water from other sources to breed. And of course Canada cut all nuclear commerce with India after their first test, because the reactor had been sold with a no weapons clause that predated the NPT.

The unfortunate thing is this myth of nuclear energy being the handmaiden of nuclear weapons,not just in reference to Canada, but as a generally accepted truth has become so entrenched that it is now assumed to be a given even by most on the pronuclear side. What I try to show, (what I've tried to show in this thread) is that any critical examination of the available evidence shows that this is certainly not the case among the Secondary Nuclear States, and that the situation is a good deal more complex than many on both sides want to believe.

A State arming itself with nuclear weapons is not a trivial matter, not for the State in question, not for the rest of the world, consequently it cannot be addressed with trivial solutions.

I took some time to revise and extend my post initially offered above on this thread. As stated on another thread, I thought it would be effective to approach professional and personal contacts of important government decisions makers as a back door into the halls of power.

I ran across an old MIT video about the future of nuclear power on which Allison Macfarlane provided a counterpoint to Dr. Andrew Kadak’s presentation.

Reference:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/447

And as it so happened, I had remembered that I saw somewhere that Allison Macfarlane co-authored a paper with Holdren.

From what I saw on the MIT video, Allison Macfarlane is very knowledgeable about nuclear power and its issues. I thought she would appreciate the obscure technicalities in the thorium technology. An explanation of what thorium could bring to the proliferation dilemma might be understood and would be a good first test of the thorium argument against proliferation. Here is my e-mail and the response from Allison Macfarlane.

E-Mail to Allison Macfarlane

I watched with interest the video of your participation in the “Future of Nuclear Energy” forum at MIT on 3/1/2007 and it struck me that there could be an alternative to the basic premise of your presentation. In that regard, please accept my following comment to your discussion.


In your recitation of the litany of the problems with nuclear power, you said that “the energy and the weapons atom are the same”. That can be changed.

Thorium breeding and the Thorium fuel cycle could be the possible technical solution to the nuclear proliferation dilemma as follows.

Uranium use would be phased out along with it associated fuel reprocessing or enrichment.

If nuclear power production is decoupled from nuclear weapons production by eliminating the uranium fuel cycle and uranium mining, proliferation prone reprocessing and enrichment, this would free nuclear power to grow unimpeded by proliferation fears as a basis of a second nuclear age. This decouples nuclear weapons from power production and removes the power productions cover for weapons development.

Besides making the production of a plutonium bomb far more difficult, weapons would have nothing to do with nuclear power. Thorium would be the nuclear power paradigm. Uranium would be the nuclear weapons paradigm.

The goal is to remove the need for the rogue nation from developing a nuclear infrastructure and a large trained nuclear work force that could be used to develop nuclear weapons on the side and in the dark of night.

By so decoupling nuclear power from the ability to produce nuclear weapons, any nation that persists in acquiring and independent nuclear capability must by doing it to develop nuclear weapons.

The technical challenge is to make thorium fuel in the form of 60 MM ceramic coated graphite pebbles near proliferation proof. Here is how that might be done.

A nation can run a thorium once through deep burn (<90%) fuel cycle using 60 MM thorium pebbles in a Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor (PB-AHTR) that is currently under development at the University of Southern California at Berkley.

Because this breeding reactor has a breeding ratio <1 (1.05 to 1.07), there would be no need for plutonium reprocessing or uranium enrichment to produce fuel. The PB-AHTR would run in perpetuity on an endless supply of blanket pebbles individually accounted for on delivery and at their decommissioning by the IAEA.

As old spent pebbles are delivered to the IAEA, new blanket replacement pebbles would be supplied. The cost of these pebbles is insignificant since they don’t contain any fissile material.

In explanation, a blanket pebble is a ceramic coated graphite ball containing only a small amount of fertile thorium each. They are bred to contain fissile U233 in the blanket region of the PB-AHTR reactor to form seed pebbles which support the nuclear reaction. The blanket pebbles can be spiked with Th230 to produce additional U232, a nasty gamma emitter to make weapons production deadly. The fissile U233 content can also be easily denatured to weapons production by dumping in some U238 (5 parts U238 to every part of TH232) to denature the thorium in the blanket pebbles. There is no such process available for denaturing plutonium.

A large number of seed pebbles (in the hundreds of thousands) would be required to construct a nuclear device enabled through denatured U233 reprocessing. Even a diversion of a small number of seed pebbles would cause a subcritical shut down of the reactor.

Reprocessing of denatured U233 does not currently exist anywhere in the world and would require a hugely expensive and costly research and deployment effort by the proliferator; in fact, it may not even be possible.

Because the PB-AHTR is a highly moderated graphite/molten fluoride salt thermal reactor, very little or a trace amount of PU239 (.001 of the amount contained in Light Water Reactor (LWR) waste or about 1kg/GW/year) is present in the spent pebbles. Also, a large amount of Pu238 from the U233 fission chain would make it difficult for that PU239 to be used for weapons construction.

Unlike LWR wastes, because of the small quantity of transuranic waste that is produced in the thermal thorium cycle (.001 to .0001 that of LWR waste) and contained in the spent pebbles, the resulting radio toxicity would be short lived (cooled in a few hundred years). Furthermore, this waste is not capable of use in weapons development at any stage.

If desired, the most long lived waste, carbon 14, can be separated out of the waste stream and sequestered by absorption in certain natural minerals at the bottom of a bore hole.

The PB-AHTR is a small, powerful and efficient (~50%) reactor with a very high power density and high operating temperature (700 °C). The construction cost of a PB-AHTR is economic with a projected cost of about one half that of the equivalent sized LWR.

In summary, the key advantage of the Thorium fuel cycle is that it allows for nuclear fuel breeding without the need to ever isolate a pure fissile bomb capable product to come into existence.

Would this work?

Thank you for the opportunity to bring this little known technology to your attention.

E-Mail response from Allison Macfarlane

Thanks for your thoughtful message. For a long time I have maintained that the only potential way around the nuclear energy - nuclear weapons linkage is through the thorium cycle (or the complete devaluing and abolition of nuclear weapons - perhaps further off than any potential nuclear energy technology). I am intrigued by the work being done at Berkeley - are you involved in it?

The thorium cycle is quite promising and thorium is more abundant than uranium, so there would be no resource issue. I think this is the kind of research that needs to be done.

As for reprocessing for U-233 - I do think it could be done, but as you point out, U can be easily denatured; Pu cannot. The questions about this type of technology are what are the pitfalls and how much will it cost? The cost, pragmatically speaking, will be the real bottom line.

Best regards,

Allison

"The fissile U233 content can also be easily denatured to weapons production by dumping in some U238 (5 parts U238 to every part of TH232) to denature the thorium in the blanket pebbles. There is no such process available for denaturing plutonium."

You can't steer the neutrons to only capture on Th making u233. If you add u238 to denature u233 you will end up with captures on u238 and a nice clean pure pu239 in your pebbles.

OK fine, we have a solution - to a problem that I have tried to show doesn't exist. In all honesty I have to ask if I have not make the point clear that the evidence indicates that proliferation is not driven by the adoption of nuclear power? That even if a proliferation-proof power generating technology were adopted, without the meaningful threat of military intervention, nations that want to, and are capable of mounting a weapons program will do so?

Events in the world have also moved past the point where it is possible to dictate terms on the use of nuclear energy, and at any rate as the clipping I posted up thread indicates, anti-proliferation is seen now more as an attempt by large nations to maintain hegemony by the size of their conventional forces.

I contend that efforts to control the technology or the traffic in materials, or the actions of sovereign nations within their own borders will fail unless backed up by force, and if this is the case it matters little what technology is being interdicted.

Can anyone show me why this is wrong?

If we could just get you to set the rules for nuclear power as regards proliferation we would be in grand shape!!

In the meantime, we have to put up with odd rules and figure out the best we can to avoid them.
(But you have convinced me that we should try to argue against them where we have the chance).

Then who does set these rules, and how are they enforced? The most powerful States have limited their compliance with the NPT to the narrowest interpretation of certain specific clauses, and small nuclear States have ignored it outright. The NPT is all but dead, little more than lip service is being paid to it, and now that India is on the verge of exporting reactors, all but pointless. Uranium moves about the world largely unimpeded, and it is almost impossible to determine what is dual use and what is not in processing hardware anymore.

Where this is the only reason to develop thorium based reactors (which it is not) it would be an abject failure because it doesn't matter how much the disarmament crowd is impressed, without some way of forcing its adoption, it's going nowhere.

In your version of the world, weapons proliferation is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In your view, the real intent of the big 5, is to further their national interest in the maintenance of national power through an unspoken agenda of power projection. I personally have trouble addressing an argument on multiple levels especially when the motivation “the unspoken agenda” is a metaphysical musing that must be deduced to facilitate the formation of an opinion from an analysis of actions and reactions of geopolitical players that may or may not be true in a given point in history.

All this unspoken maneuvering is the stuff of conjecture and tremendously complicates and obscures the proliferation question. Keep things simple. Your argument is an exercise in a speculative projection of all the possible future outcomes that might occur derived from an opinion of the current state of history.

The golden rule of diplomacy is “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” I want to just address the “riddle” of weapons proliferation and leave the "mystery" and the "enigma" aspects of this question to the march of history. Solve one thing at a time; address the visible aspect of the problem, and wait for the invisible aspect to surface of its own accord and at its own pace.