Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's by their population centres.)
For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on Russia and Central Asia.
[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for a global power.
Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.
Sure. That doesn't remove stockpiles' inherent disadvantages: finiteness and vulnerability. Relying on uranium stockpiles would immediately put China at a known limit in a war of attrition that wouldn't constrain their adversaries.
Reserves != stockpiles.
Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.
Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.
And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to extract than uranium.
There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed because of the price being too low.
Uranium is better for Chinese energy security than oil. But this still leaves China at Moscow's mercy. That's not too differet, energywise, than the situation is now.
https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/yea...
> Considering both the low and high nuclear capacity scenarios to 2050 presented in this edition, and assuming their 2050 capacity is maintained for the rest of the century, the quantities of uranium required by the global fleet – based on the current once-through fuel cycle – would likely surpass the currently identified uranium resource base in the highest cost category before the 2110s.
Their "high" scenario assumes having a bit more than double of today's capacity by 2050; today we have about 4-5% supply from nuclear energy worldwide.
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_103179/uranium-2024-resourc...
The actual efficiency of breeding thorium is so low, it would take a HUGE scarcity to actual make any sense.
Also, currently all transport channels for uranium are oil dependent, which is becoming a scarce resource in the relevant timeline - decades.
There are also other advantages of a liquid fueled reactor. The big one is that it is far easier to run because it self regulates. When a liquid heats up it expands (slowing the reaction) and when it cools it contracts (speeding up the reaction). So its safer to run, makes less waste and gets 20+X more power per unit of fuel.
There is one final thing to know about this stuff. A nuclear reactor is several billion in infrastructure supporting reactors that cost 10s of millions using a fuel load that costs less than your car. The way we scale and handle nuclear reactors just makes no sense economically. Each NPP is custom and they are built so rarely that everything has to be custom made. When you start building stock reactor designs with consistent supply chains, the cost goes way down. And most of the cost is lawsuits, lobbyists and PR. For developed countries, using or not using nuclear power is a political choice. One that we have been making badly. When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense. Once again, the cause is just the excuse, not the real issue.
Not sure I get what you are trying to say. Are you saying that you are a nuclear engineer and I am not? Because, frankly, the rest of your comment does not read as one written by a nuclear engineer.
That’s not really accurate. Many countries already meet a substantial portion of their baseload power requirements with renewables and are building out more and more renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.
This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for the plant.
Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that role so it seems little is likely to be built.
We really do. Nuclear waste is less toxic than plenty of trash we just bury. And calling it "waste" is a bit reductive, given it almost certainly becomes valuable to reprocess within another century or two.
Long term storage is still up in the air in the US. Yucca mountain was the plan but didn't happen
Correct me if I'm with m wrong
We also know that we could re-cycle nuclear waste with other nuclear plant designs, but the US chooses not to.
The crazy part is that people want to insist that the sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make anybody safer. They're just red tape.
It's peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty much every country though? I know Finland is well on its way for long term storage but that's the only example I know of.
There's also quite a few cases where it is a technical problem. Gorleben in Germany for example.
It's a political problem in every country that shares its nuclear heritage from the ashes of WWII.
Point to the nuclear waste.
If there’s so much of it somebody must be able to point it out to me.
Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.
Dr Barry Brook. Reading his stuff 15 years ago flipped me.
With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".
It's not uniformly distributed. Countries like India, for ezample, has an abundance of Thorium but they have to buy Uranium for use in any large scale application.
I also like to think of U/nuclear as "Civilizational thinking" - it's the only solid power we can trust to stay by us through 10,000s of years, through cataclysims, and planet migrations, and it's ideal (before we find something more abundant, dense, and reliable) to take us from Earth, to a multi-planet, local-cluster exploring species, I think.
In principle, using Thorium would give you the energy from Thorium fission, then Uranium fission, then plutonium fission, which is pretty cool. However, I suspect you might hit an issue here where such a low conversion rate would make the reactor go sub-critical.
When a nuclear reactor is run with mildly-enriched Uranium, which is a mixture of Uranium 235 and Uranium 238, it forms a self-sustaining chain reaction with the Uranium 235 (which is fissile) and a load of the spare neutrons get absorbed by the Uranium 238 (which is fertile), converting it into Plutonium 239, which is also fissile. But most Uranium 235 reactors use a moderator which slows down the neutrons, which makes them more likely to cause fission in Uranium 235 but less likely to transmute Uranium 238 to Plutonium 239. So most modern reactors don't produce much Plutonium. In any case, the fission you get from Uranium and the fission you get from Plutonium is from different source materials. Once an atom is fissioned, it is split into smaller atoms and can no longer be fissioned.
Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. That is, if you fire a neutron at Thorium 232, you get Thorium 233, which decays to Protactinium 233, which then decays into Uranium 233, which is fissile. You then fire another neutron at Uranium 233, which then fissions into much smaller nuclei, giving you energy and the neutrons to do the above. The Uranium is no longer around after that to form Plutonium. There is no way to get any significant amount of Plutonium 239 from this, because that would require adding 7 more neutrons to the original Thorium 232 and having none of them trigger a fission event. The fissions that do occur don't provide 7 neutrons anyway, so it wouldn't be possible to get a self-sustaining conversion of a significant amount of Thorium into Plutonium for final fission even if the previous sentence weren't true - it would have to be enhanced with some other provider of lots of neutrons.
Holy shit what a perspective. Put it in a museum. If this is representative, put it on our grave.
Also: passive safety (the thing just drains and freezes if anything goes wrong), no pressure vessel, tiny physical footprint, way less long-lived actinides, and U-233 is basically proliferation-proof because of the hard gamma from U-232. Uranium feels cheap and plentiful right now exactly the way oil felt infinite in the 1950s. China is playing the long game, and this little 2 MW rig lighting up and breeding U-233 last month is the “Sputnik moment” for the thorium cycle.
So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its hands. China says 10 MW by 2030 and 100 MW demo by 2035. I wouldn’t bet against them.
So yeah, exciting as hell actually.
Literally almost all the waste that’s ever been generated is stored on site at the nuclear power plants where it was created. That’s how little of it there is.
Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
2. There is no high level waste that is both very dangerous right now, and will remain so for tens of thousands of years. It’s either highly radioactive for not very long, or not very radioactive for very long, but never both.
How do these myths persist in otherwise educated people.
What is the actual volume?
Yeah, it’s really easy to forget how dense these materials are. A jug of milk (4L/1gal) weighs 4kg/8.8lb. Milk has about the same density as water, 1g/cm^3. Uranium has a density around 19g/cm^3, making that same gallon jug weigh 76kg/167lb. A metric ton of uranium (1000kg) is about 13 gallons.
You’re mixing mass and volume here. From what I can tell, their numbers were essentially right. Are you saying we don’t have thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste produced?
That's not true.
The spent fuel can burn in fast reactors. There are hundreds of molten salt reactor designs (see for example [1]), and some of them are fast reactors.
But thorium MSR are not fast. That's the attraction of thorium, it can undergo transmutation (into protactinium, which then decays into fissile uranium-233) using thermal neutrons. Nobody is proposing thorium MSR as a solution to burn spent nuclear fuel.
> So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its hands.
The West does not keep sitting on its hands. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of nuclear startups in the West, and they are actually making progress.
However, thorium is hard. Very hard. Breeding plutonium from uranium is much easier than breeding uranium-233 from thorium.
Here's a good post [2] about the thorium myths written by a former active HN forum member, Nick Touran. It's a good read. But, now, for an even better understanding, you can just ask ChatGPT, or any other LLM, how thorium breeder reactors compare to plutonium breeder reactors, and which technology is closer to reality.
[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/STI-DOC-010-4...
Once again, nothing.
Is this a typo? I can understand increasing the yield to a number slightly below 1, but how do you get more than 1mol Uranium from 1mol Thorium?
China ran an experimental reactor that achieved some conversion of thorium into uranium. More precisely, the conversion ratio was 0.1 [1]. This means that for each new fissile atom generated from thorium (i.e. uranium-233) 10 atoms have been burned from the original fissile inventory.
Now, conversion happens in every nuclear reactor. Some new fissile material (generally Pu-239) is generated out of "fertile material" (generally U-238). And, surprisingly, that conversion ratio is quite high: 0.6 for pressurized light water reactors and 0.8 for pressurized heavy water reactors [2].
What China has achieved therefore is well below what is business as usual in regular reactors. The only novelty is that the breeding used thorium, rather than uranium.
Is this useless? No, it is not. In principle increasing the conversion ratio from 0.1 to something higher than 1.0 should be doable. But then, going from 0.8 in heavy water reactors to more than 1.0 should be even easier. Why don't people do it already? Because the investment needed to do all the research is quite significant, and the profits that can be derived from that are quite uncertain and overall the risk adjusted return on investment is not justified. If you are a state, you can ignore that. If China continues the research in thorium breeding, and eventually an economically profitable thorium breeder reactor comes out of that, the entire world will benefit. But the best case scenario is that this would be three decades in the future.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-msr-achi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Conversion_rat...