Thorium: A Nuclear Power that Green Investors Might Like

There is a relatively new type of nuclear power that is starting to gain popularity, albeit at a very slow pace. Thorium nuclear power may be the next major source of green power.

Many green investors and socially responsible investors have several issues with uranium generated nuclear power, including the potential for meltdowns and the hazardous waste that is generated along with the disposal. But with thorium, it only creates a small amount of the hazardous waste generated by uranium reactors. Thorium won't produce runaway chain reactions, unlike uranium. Thorium is even more plentiful than uranium.

Spent fuel produces a much lower amount of waste, which is less radioactive than uranium. All in all, thorium power is safer and cheaper than uranium.

For investors, there is Fortum Corp. (FOJCF.PK), a Finnish based utility, which is in partnership with Statkraft in Norway, Scatec which is also in Norway, and Vattenfall in Sweden, to create a thorium nuclear plant.

There is also the very low cap Thorium Power, Ltd. (THPW.OB), which produces and sells nuclear fuel designs, including thorium/uranium nuclear fuel for power plants. The company has generated negative earnings for the latest reported quarter, and operating income is negative. However, they are debt free with $4.9 million in cash. Because the stock has a very low capitalization, it should be considered very speculative.

Punj Lloyd Limited (PUNJLLOYD.NS), which trades on the National Stock Exchange of India, is in a 50/50 joint venture with Thorium Power to use thorium in a nuclear power plant.

Since thorium isn't usable to make a bomb, is more abundant and produces far more energy than uranium, and produces far less waste, the story isn't just a green story but a financial story, and worth looking at for the long term.

Disclosure: Author does not own any of the above.

Comments

[optionsgirl:]

I have been watching the thorium story unfold and am fascinated by it, though I don't have any particular urge to buy into it yet.
Thanks for mentioning Fortum- time to do some research!

Sep 27 03:53 AM

[Ferdinand E...:]

The only important thing above is the contention that thorium is more plentiful than uranium, which may be true And since it is also fissionable it is an important resource.

Sep 27 09:47 AM

[ARC:]

wht about energy located in montana? Do you know when they are going public?

Is it not also that throium is abled to be stored with less diffuclty and danger??

arc

Sep 27 09:58 AM

[Jimbo:]

Our Nobel Prize Energy Secretary should get into this with both feet. Widespread use of EVs will stress the electric grid. A grid based on Thorium reactors could be our salvation.

Sep 27 10:50 AM

[john s. gordon:]

for a long time now you have been able to buy D2O moderated reactors from AECL in canada which operate on Th.
they are of interest in places like brazil & india which have substantial resources of monazite.
> jack

Sep 27 12:23 PM

[Steven Ward:]

The Obama people know about Th. In fact, they know that the US currently has the largest known reserves of Th in the world, about 25 percent of known reserves. Th is like our oil, not green enough for the folks cirrently in charge to exploit.

Want Th reactors, get a new President in 2012.

Sep 27 12:45 PM

[bpickard:]

If Thorium is so good, why aren't companies like GE heavily into it? There has to be something missing from this analysis. Cheap, plentiful, safe, can't be used for weapons - I apologize if I am an uneducated skeptic, but this sounds too good to be true. To paraphrase Paul Harvey - what's the rest of the story?

Sep 27 12:46 PM

[Davewmart:]

hpickard said:
'If Thorium is so good, why aren't companies like GE heavily into it? There has to be something missing from this analysis. Cheap, plentiful, safe, can't be used for weapons - I apologize if I am an uneducated skeptic, but this sounds too good to be true. To paraphrase Paul Harvey - what's the rest of the story?

The rest of the story can be found here:
www.energyfromthorium.com/

You have named one of the reasons why the sucessful US demo in the 60's on liquid fluoride thorium reactors (a very safe reactor which would burn fuel many times more efficiently than in current reactors) was stopped.
It was no good for producing weapons grade materials, so the military did not like it.
In this design you would not have to process the fuel rods, where a lot of the profit of nuclear industry comes from, so they did not like it.
It has genuine potential to replace coal on a large scale, with small, cheap, factory built reactors, so the fossil fuel industries did not like it.
It is called 'nuclear', so many people would be put off just at that word, although it is in fact quite safe.
The bosses of the nuclear industry were comitted to Light Water Reactors, although it was one of the prime designers of these who decided that they were great for producing weapon's grade material, but not the best way to go to produce civil nuclear power.

So the short answer is that there were too many constituencies against it, and too much inertia behind uranium.

Sep 27 02:31 PM

[Dave K.:]

Thorium does produce 233U, which can be made into nuclear bombs though it would have to extracted from the fuel rods. However, the material is very difficult to work with because of the presence of 232U, which is very radioactive and the bombs would be easy to detect because of the strong gamma ray background they would produce.
So Thorium isn’t as bad as some of the nuclear fuels but still represents along term source of radioactive waste.
If countries want to go nuclear they should invest in a few wild card fusion technologies in addition to the current program. Fusion reactors though still a ways away doesn’t generate as many of the nasty long-term radioactive waste.
Short term is still renewable wind, solar and geothermal in combination with grid storage. Is nuclear really economical on a cost basis of per watt if you include the long-term disposal of the waste?

Sep 27 02:54 PM

[Superpsiboy:]

read the thpw yahoo message board

thorium power.com as well

Sep 27 04:03 PM

[Davewmart:]

Dave K said:
'So Thorium isn’t as bad as some of the nuclear fuels but still represents along term source of radioactive waste. '

Well, yes and no.
The potentially much higher burn for some thorium technologies mean that the volume of waste could be very minimal, hugely less than in present uranium reactors.
All the electric in the States could be generated using around 500 tons of thorium per year!
The waste would be commensurately small.
Of this waste, around 83% would have lost enough radioactivity within ten years that it could be processed to extract valuable materials.
The remaining 17%, or around 170kgs for a large 1GW reactor, would then deteriorate to the same level as the ore it came from within 300 years.
The reason for this is that the really nasty actinides could be burnt, and this would include those from current reactors, so the waste problem becomes fuel! No Yucca mountain needed.
So in other words thorium technology could reduce both the volume and longevity of nuclear waste hugely.
This is something which needs to be dealt with anyway.
As a bonus we can use it to generate all the power we need.
No radical new technology is needed, just normal engineering development of things we have a good grasp of and that have been experimentally proven.
We don't need to wait for fusion.

Sep 27 04:13 PM

[loquacite:]

- "All the electric in the States could be generated using around 500 tons of thorium per year!"

It's more like 14,000 tons. 14,000 tons of thorium could fuel USA's 550 GWe grid. This would first require an extra 450 GWe of nuclear capacity to be added to the grid.

This is still half the quantity of uranium that is currently required for the existing nuclear capacity of only 99 GWe.

So, in other words, half the material, five times the energy, probably half or one-third the waste. Pretty good deal.

- " for a long time now you have been able to buy D2O moderated reactors from AECL in canada which operate on Th."

That is simply false. No reactor in the world burns thorium at present. CANDUs can burn thorium, and so can every other reactor in the world. They just don't because there is no fuel that is permitted -- including Thorium Power's fuel. THPW's fuel is perhaps 10 years away from being permitted.

- "And since it is also fissionable it is an important resource."

Thorium is not fissile -- or fissionable. Thorium contains no fissile isotopes in its natural form. That is why fissile material must be mixed with it in order to create fuel.

Sep 27 05:50 PM

[Davewmart:]

Loquacite said:
'It's more like 14,000 tons. 14,000 tons of thorium could fuel USA's 550 GWe grid. This would first require an extra 450 GWe of nuclear capacity to be added to the grid.'

The amount that you give is still a tiny amount - compare that to the millions of tons of coal burn!
I believe a lot depends on exactly what assumptions are being made about the precise technological options used - when you are talking about really small amounts of fuel for vast amounts of energy, it may be desirable to trade off some of the efficiency to optimise other things.
Here is the nuclear engineer I am basing my figures on giving a Google talk recently:
thoriumenergy.blogspot...

And here are the slide shows from the presentation:
www.energyfromthorium....

500tonnes or 14,000tonnes though, the amount of fuel used and waste is small, and would save many thousands of deaths a year from pollution arising from coal mining.

Sep 27 06:29 PM

[AnEngineer:]

Loquacite said:

'It's more like 14,000 tons. 14,000 tons of thorium could fuel USA's 550 GWe grid.

Loquatcite, your numbers are for a completely different technology than David K. was referring to. David K. is quoting the most common and supported statistics for LFTR technology. The MSR (pre-LFTR design) at Oak Ridge in the late 50s and early 60s demonstrated that approximately 1 ton of thorium generates 1 GW year of electricity. So, 550 GW years require about 550 tons of thorium.

Bpickard, as for why GE and the others are not all over this?

1) They make their money not on reactors but the uranium fuel cycle and ancillary products. The reactor business died years ago and this is how that part of the business survived. Thorium kills their current golden goose. They know the entire US market for thorium is only about 550 tons per year which makes the entire world market only about 2,000+ tons. So, there is almost no annuity fuel business with LFTR technology and they hate that. But this is the minor issue.

2) Here is the issue. The NRC has structured itself to exclude any new technology. These guys are so gun-shy from TMI that they won't let any real new technology materialize just in case something could possibly go wrong. Remember, the NRC’s first job is to protect the NRC and not the public. Pushing LFTR technology through the NRC quagmire will take years if it's possible at all.

Consider this, 90% of the employees at any nuclear power station have nothing to do with nuclear power. They do paperwork for the NRC and the NRC likes that.

Sep 27 08:30 PM

[ARC:]

bull garbage.......last president was the one who caused problems with his ignorance, alcoholism and a mate like cheney...............they cwere problems how blind can anyone be!


On Sep 27 12:45 PM Steven Ward wrote:

> The Obama people know about Th. In fact, they know that the US currently
> has the largest known reserves of Th in the world, about 25 percent
> of known reserves. Th is like our oil, not green enough for the folks
> cirrently in charge to exploit.
>
> Want Th reactors, get a new President in 2012.

Sep 28 10:41 AM

[realold:]

Good information, bad conclusion. Short term should be natural gas, mid-term nuclear and nat gas, then long term wind, solar, etc.


On Sep 27 02:54 PM Dave K. wrote:

> Thorium does produce 233U, which can be made into nuclear bombs though
> it would have to extracted from the fuel rods. However, the material
> is very difficult to work with because of the presence of 232U, which
> is very radioactive and the bombs would be easy to detect because
> of the strong gamma ray background they would produce.
> So Thorium isn’t as bad as some of the nuclear fuels but still represents
> along term source of radioactive waste.
> If countries want to go nuclear they should invest in a few wild
> card fusion technologies in addition to the current program. Fusion
> reactors though still a ways away doesn’t generate as many of the
> nasty long-term radioactive waste.
> Short term is still renewable wind, solar and geothermal in combination
> with grid storage. Is nuclear really economical on a cost basis of
> per watt if you include the long-term disposal of the waste?

Sep 28 08:02 PM

[realold:]

Obama has not embraced natural gas, which emits 1/2 the carbon of coal and oil used to fuel electric power plants that would provide electricty for greeny electric cars. This fact alone means that he is more interested in satisfying his money tree than really helping America. Obama is all about government control of your life and wealth transfer to the have nothing/do nothing part of society. You sound like one of those.

On Sep 28 10:41 AM ARC wrote:

> bull garbage.......last president was the one who caused problems
> with his ignorance, alcoholism and a mate like cheney...............they
> cwere problems how blind can anyone be!

Sep 28 08:07 PM

[loquacite:]

"David K. is quoting the most common and supported statistics for LFTR technology."

Right. I should have known.

Let me just ask you all one question.

What's more likely?

a) Government (private sector would never have anything to do with it) spends billions of dollars and decades to develop, permit, construct a prototype, test run prototype, develop, permit, construct commercial model of a vastly different reactor type that has never been operated before successfully, and then build an international fleet of newly designed reactors?

or

b) Private sector spends less than $100 million and 10 years to permit a fuel design that will work in 100% of existing reactors and yield all the safety, waste and proliferation advantages of (a) above, with no differential infrastructural capex?

The LFTR is a red herring -- plain and simple. Anyone who actually believes this fairy tale technology will actually see the light of day before 2050 is in the clouds.

It's somewhat tangential to this thread, since you are right, the difference between 500 tons and 14,000 tons is negligible in practical terms. Nevertheless, it gives rise to this bad smell in the thorium world that inexplicably won't go away.

Sep 29 12:13 AM

[FRE:]

Not quite right. There are other important things.

When thorium is used as reactor fuel, the resulting waste has a much shorter half-life so needs to be sequestered for only a few hundred years rather than thousands of years. And, the amount of waste generated is far less. Presumably these things are as important as the fact that is is more plentiful than uranium.


On Sep 27 09:47 AM Ferdinand E. Banks wrote:

> The only important thing above is the contention that thorium is
> more plentiful than uranium, which may be true And since it is also
> fissionable it is an important resource.

Dec 14 10:54 PM