It is unlikely the thorium dream will be realized anytime soon as it is a very long difficult road to travel particularly as the USA prefers uranium and built and abandoned a thorium reactor years ago.
India and Holland are both trying to build one but their research is not in the same street as that of the USA.Why India wants to turn its beaches into nuclear fuelBy Edd Gent 18 October 2018
For decades, India has planned to fuel a carbon-free future with its thorium-rich sands. Is the country any closer to reaching its goals?The tropical beaches of India probably bring to mind sun-dappled palms, fiery fish curries and dreadlocked backpackers, but they also hold a surprising secret. Their sands are rich in thorium – often hailed as a cleaner, safer alternative to conventional nuclear fuels.
The country has long been eager to exploit its estimated 300,000 to 850,000 tonnes of thorium – quite probably the world’s largest reserves – but progress has been slow. Their effort is coming back into focus amid renewed interest in the technology. Last year Dutch scientists fired up the first new experimental thorium reactor in decades, start-ups are promoting the technology in the West and last year China pledged to spend $3.3bn to develop reactors that could eventually run on thorium.
Proponents say it promises carbon-free power with less dangerous waste, lower risk of meltdowns and a much harder route to weaponisation than conventional nuclear. But rapid advances in renewables, a costly development path and question marks over how safe and clean future plants would really be mean its journey to commercialisation looks uncertain.
India’s pursuit of thorium is driven by unique historical and geographic conditions, which have given it considerable staying power. Some see a quixotic quest unlikely to live up to its promise, but the country’s nuclear scientists see a long-term strategy for carbon-free energy security in a country whose population could peak at 1.7 billion in 2060.
“We are a power hungry nation,” says Srikumar Banerjee, secretary of India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) until 2012. “Eventually we need to rely on indigenous raw materials for the long-term sustainability of a country which is going to support one fifth of humanity.”
India is pouring vast sums into its nuclear programme, which includes the four heavy water reactors at Kaiga, Karnataka (Credit: Getty Images)
The West’s development of nuclear energy was inextricably linked to the development of atomic bombsToday all commercial nuclear plants run on uranium, a fact at least partly down to geopolitics. The West’s development of nuclear energy was inextricably linked to the development of atomic bombs and uranium’s by-products are much easier to weaponise. “In a different era maybe a different choice would be made and we'd have headed down the thorium route in the 1950s instead, but we are we are where we are,” says Geoff Parks, a nuclear engineer at Cambridge University.
India’s strategy was governed by different calculus. The country’s meagre uranium deposits convinced the founding father of its nuclear programme, Homi Bhabha, that any long-term strategy must exploit thorium, its most abundant fuel, which inspired a three-stage programme that is still the central plank of India’s nuclear energy policy.
Thorium doesn’t spontaneously undergo fission – when an atom’s nucleus splits and releases energy that can generate electricity. Left to its own devices it decays very slowly, giving off alpha radiation that can’t even penetrate human skin, so holidaymakers don’t need to worry about sunbathing on thorium-rich beaches.
To turn it into nuclear fuel, it needs to be combined with a fissile material like plutonium, which releases neutrons as it undergoes fission. These are captured by thorium atoms, converting them into a fissile isotope of uranium called U233. An isotype is a variant of an element with a different number of neutrons.
Fukushima still casts a long shadow over any new nuclear plans, but proponents of thorium power plants argue that they would be less prone to meltdowns (Credit: Getty Images)
“Thorium is like wet wood,” says Ratan Kumar Sinha, who succeeded Banerjee as DAE secretary before leaving the post in 2015. He explains that wet wood is no good at starting a fire, but once it’s placed in a furnace burning dry wood, it can catch light. The first two stages of India’s strategy are therefore aimed at converting its abundant thorium reserves into fissile material.
First, conventional uranium-fuelled reactors produce plutonium as a by-product. The next stage combines this with more uranium in ‘fast breeder’ reactors that generate more plutonium than they use. That’s used to build more breeder reactors, and once the fleet is large enough they switch to converting thorium into U233. The final stage combines U233 with more thorium to kick-start self-sustaining ‘thermal breeder’ reactors that can be refuelled using raw thorium.
Read the interesting rest herehttp://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-why-india-wants-to-turn-its-beaches-int...