Clean electricity, cheap electricity, safe electricity

The federal government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) signals its desire for Australian carbon emissions (currently 28.3 tonnes per capita, yearly) to drop to 60 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020, after allowing for population growth.

If it’s business as usual, I can see some difficulty meeting that goal. However, we don’t have time for business as usual - climate change slowly parboils us all.

It makes sense to go after the biggest source of carbon emissions first - which, in Australia’s case, is the power generation industry. It emits nearly 14 tonnes per head (PDF 88KB), and it’s fairly concentrated, unlike agriculture (4.2 tonnes) and transport (3.8 tonnes). Clean power generation up, and we can meet, and beat, the CPRS goal. We can’t cut our own economic throats cleaning up our act, so we need reliable, emission-free power to avoid disrupting the Australian economy.

This can be done, for roughly the cost of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package, inside ten years, benefiting Australian national security, the power industry, the coal industry, and the Australian consumer.

Enter the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) (DOC 3.1MB). As the name suggests (PDF 768KB), it:

• is a liquid-fuelled nuclear reactor;
• runs on thorium; and
• is toothpaste and table-salt safe;

On top of that, it’s cheap and quick to build.

Table salt and toothpaste

What does high pressure in a pressure vessel want to do and why do conventional reactors put their fuel there?

The LFTR doesn't do this: it puts its fuel at the lowest pressure in the reactor so if there is a leak, it leaks in, not out. We simply don’t need the massive, expensive, pressure vessel that is a conventional reactor (PDF 2.83MB)!

How do you melt a liquid? How do you melt the already-liquid water in your morning cup of tea or coffee? Meltdown is simply not a problem in the LFTR.

Any leaking fuel drips out of the reactor and into dump tanks below, where it freezes solid. If the entire fuel load at full throttle dumped into those tanks at once, it would freeze solid within 48 hours. These tanks are tiny: 10 cubic metres for a hundred-megawatt reactor.

This combination results in an inherently safe reactor, simple enough to be mass-produced in a factory: a quarter of the cost of a conventional reactor.

Two real prototype reactors have shown these safety benefits, most recently the one at the Nuclear Research Institute Rez at Prague in the Czech Republic in 2008.

The bit left over

The thorium-uranium cycle can completely extract all the energy available - like a slow combustion stove - leaving only the ash and no half-burned fuel as happens in conventional reactors. So, we use 1 per cent of the fuel of a conventional reactor to generate the same amount of raw heat.

For every 100 heavy metal atoms we start with, the conventional uranium-plutonium cycle leaves 15, but the thorium-uranium cycle leaves less than 1.5. With ten times less heavy metals left over per kilo of fuel, combined with 100 times fewer kilos, makes a 1,000-fold reduction in heavy metals left over per kilowatt-hour.

Finally, the LFTR operates at much higher temperatures than conventional reactors - getting an extra third more electricity out of the same amount of heat. That’s at least 130 times less fuel used and 1,300 times less heavy metal left over per kilowatt-hour, meaning 130 times less "waste". Since the processing cycle retains 99.7 per cent of the heavy metals this means 400,000 times less heavy metal goes to “waste” per kilowatt-hour (this amounts to about 50gm of heavy metal ash for powering Australia for a year).

LFTR is a heavy metal “roach motel” - heavy metal checks in, but it doesn't check out.

If we take Australia’s total electricity generating capacity (48 gigawatts), double it (allowing for growth), and convert the lot to LFTR running flat out, it would take 620 years for their combined ash to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. As natural processes compost the ash, it becomes less radioactive than the ground you’re sitting above in 300 years.

And in that ash, the so-called “waste”, are valuable minerals, such as platinum (catalysts), neodymium (permanent magnets), caesium (food sterilisation), xenon (light bulbs), strontium (space probes) and gold. Is it really “waste” if people will buy it off you?

Get ready to launch

Like all engines, the LFTR needs a spark plug to get going. Merely 500 kilograms of uranium enriched to just under 20 per cent gets each 100-megawatt core going (PDF 770KB). This is 100 litres of uranium, not even two and a half car fuel tanks, in the exact chemical form needed.

After that, no uranium is needed: the reactor will tootle away on the smell of an oily rag, munching 100 kilograms of thorium yearly, which is 20 litres of thorium - about half a fuel tank.

To get that spark plug, we send 25.4 tonnes of raw uranium to someone like AREVA and pay them to enrich it.

To decarbonise Australian power generation (48 gigawatts) would take 12,200 tonnes of raw uranium - less than 2 per cent of our reserves once - and 48 tonnes of thorium yearly after that.

Money for short

It costs $2,000 per kilowatt and takes four years to build a conventional reactor, on-site. This has already been done repeatedly in both Korea and Japan.

For $500 per kilowatt, taking two years to build, we can mass produce the much-simpler LFTR in factories. This is a good size for Australia, with a big export market and is 100 megawatt reactor units, instead of the gigawatt behemoths common overseas. This:

• develops Australian heavy manufacturing capacity;
• means cheaper, better, safer faster than bigger units; and
• reduces risk for both buyer and seller.

Converting existing powerplants can be done at low cost to any other alternative - we’re only changing the heat source, and keeping the rest. This includes the turbines, the switch yard, and the power supply contracts. The conversion would then work out to $300/kilowatt.

For a concrete example, consider Hazelwood, in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. At 1,600 megawatts of electrical output (PDF 2.83MB), it would take 16 100-megawatt LFTR core units to convert. Total cost $572 million: this is $36 million per core including spark plug. This would remove 17.6 million tonnes of annual emissions permanently, at just over $4.90 per tonne of avoided carbon.

What is LFTR worth to the coal industry?

About $40 dollars per tonne dug out of the ground.

The LFTR operates hot enough to supply what is called “process heat”, which can be used to upgrade coal to higher, more profitable grades. This can push coal upgrading to new heights, reducing the upgraded coal’s ultimate emissions by 20-25 per cent.

One tonne of Victorian brown coal, which is 50-60 per cent water, can be turned into 400 kilos of high grade black coal. Low-grade black coal, 20-30 per cent water (PDF 55KB), shows a similar gain on upgrading.

Since coal-fired power generation currently makes up 80 per cent of Australia’s generating capacity, that’s 11 tonnes per head of annual emissions that are avoided by converting existing coal plants. The coal previously burned can then be upgraded and exported, displacing a further 2.2 tonnes per head of Australian population (45.4 million tonnes annual emissions avoided by coal upgrading).

That is at least 140 million tonnes of upgraded, high-grade, coal product is exported instead of burned amounting to an extra $5.5 billion annually.

What is LFTR worth to the power industry?

About $10 per megawatt-hour of electricity generated.

High-temperature operation means more efficient power generation. For example, Callide C power station, in Biloela, Queensland, operates at a thermal efficiency of 39 per cent. That means, for every megawatt-hour generated, it has to get rid of 1.6 megawatt-hours of waste heat. Callide C uses cooling towers, consuming 1,500 litres of fresh water for every megawatt-hour sent to the grid.

By contrast, the LFTR runs at a thermal efficiency of 44 per cent (DOC 3.1MB), using dry cooling - much like your car’s radiator, on a slightly bigger scale. Like your car, a LFTR can be put where it is needed. An existing water-using power station, after being converted, can then sell the water it used to draw.

An intriguing possibility for coastal LFTR sites is to cool them by desalinating seawater. Using a simple membrane distillation process, an all-coastal LFTR fleet could produce enough drinkable water to fill Sydney Harbour every five months, while generating Australia’s 2007 power consumption. That’s half of Australia’s total drinking water consumption made independent of drought thereby putting a dent in the Murray-Darling’s problems.

How does an extra $2.4 billion a year in our collective pocket sound, as that would be the saving?

What about jobs?

That’s part of the beauty of converting existing powerplants - no one needs to lose their job. In fact, more people are needed at coal mines to tend the dedicated LFTR cores and run the coal upgrading equipment. These added jobs are at the high end of skilled and professional labour.

Yes, we need factories to build the 500 units needed to convert Australian power generation and provide process heat. Three such factories, each building 40-50 units annually, would each employ roughly 2,000 people to build the reactors, 500-600 supporting the factory, and that again for mobile crews to install the reactors. Again, this is skilled and professional work (pipefitters, electricians, engineers), with the obvious effects on the local area’s economy.

The jobs at each onshore unit simply cannot be exported, and will be around for the next two to three plant lifetimes: 250 to 300 years of highly skilled, highly paid Australian labour really kicking the economy along. Similarly for the factories - high tech, high value centres of excellence and heavy manufacturing, employing thousands of people and bringing in billions of export earnings - keeping that all onshore, benefiting Australian wallets.

This effort then places Australia in an excellent position for tens of billions of dollars in export earnings each year. Supplying and operating preassembled LFTR units, taking advantage of the Australian fleet build to form centres of excellence, keeping the Australian Safeguards Office happy.

What’s in it for me?

I thought you’d never ask (see Hargraves, R., 2009, Aim High!: Thorium energy cheaper than coal solves more than global warming, BookSurge Publishing).

Cleaner air, as fossil fired power plants are large sources of air pollution. Convert them to LFTR, and that air pollution goes away. Your health care costs also go down because your air is cleaner.

Lower energy prices follow from conversion, in two parts. First, decarbonising power generation means no carbon tax needs to be paid or emission permits need to be bought. Second, you aren’t paying for over-hyped, under-delivering “renewable” power, such as solar or wind. These have their place, but it isn't delivering reliable power for millions of ordinary Australians.

And finally, job creation. Those factories will create more than 6,000 jobs - only counting their direct effects. An entire industry will need staffing, and the education system will need to be expanded to meet the demand for qualified people.

Why haven’t I heard of this?

The LFTR was originally prototyped in 1968; the US Government ultimately pulled the plug on it because there were so many ways to produce better device-grade material, cheaper! The very reason that damned it in the USA, saves it this time around for Australia. The Americans got it off the ground, and did a lot of the basic research, while other groups, such as Professor Hideki Furukawa at the International Thorium Molten-Salt Forum in Kanagawa, Doctor Jan Uhlir at the Nuclear Research Institute Rez in Prague, and Kirk Sorenson at the University of Tennessee, have filled in gaps since. It’s up to Australia to take the LFTR beyond the speed of sound.

There have been 70,000 operational nuclear devices constructed since 1945, and not one from thorium. Yes, it is so difficult that out of the ten proliferators, none have bothered.

In summary

Using LFTR, we can:

• solve the current ETS “problem”;
• convert all our coal and natural gas powered plants, cutting their carbon emissions by 99 per cent;
• eliminate 275 million tonnes of annual emissions, forever;
• upgrade coal for export and eliminate another 55 million tonnes;
• revitalise power generation;
• quit worrying about safety - no meltdowns, boiler explosions, etc; andpower Australia while producing merely 48 tonnes of by-product per year (12 bathtubs of valuable, reusable and recyclable by-product).