Dr. Ben Miles: Thorium Reactor Update

Another potential bit of good news.

This report by Dr. Ben Miles puts thorium as a reactor fuel in context with uranium/plutonium, and it all sounds really good. It’s much more plentiful than uranium, the associated waste products from fission are much milder than uranium’s deadly, long lasting mess, and best of all there’s no way to make bombs with it.

He’s missing some of the nitty gritty details though, I’ve read on this and there are a lot of gotchas in the thorium fission process. This is the level at which I recall things, I don’t know the details without review. I presume whomever is working on this has clever solutions for all those problems I saw detailed in a report some time last year.

Like Humanity’s Hope: Helion, the most mature fusion system in the works, if we could simply get molten salt thorium systems running and start cranking out reactors that would be fabulous. First it kills the coal plants, then the small number of oil fired systems, then it’ll radiate from there. Natural gas peaker plants might linger, but thorium will step right into declining production at hydroelectric plants, pumped hydro for peaker work will become more broadly used, desalination gets easier, and then perhaps we can even start some of these largely theoretical CO2 capture systems.

Right now CO2 capture isn’t going to cut the atmospheric concentration; the temptation to combine it with hydrogen cracked from water will be too strong for a VERY long time. But if we can start getting double duty out of CO2 emissions that is a valuable stride towards emission reduction. There are a lot of places where electrification of vehicles makes no sense - farming, fisheries, forestry, mining, basically anywhere you need heavy duty horsepower and there aren’t a lot of people around to justify building an electrical grid.

If we don’t change and swiftly, I think we’re headed for the dreaded “extinction level event”. We’re getting our butts kicked with just 1.2C of warming and by 2100 we’ll take a massive hit to human cognition due to CO2. But with two plausible solutions in the form of fission and fusion, we might just wiggle through the bottleneck we face.