Clean electricity, cheap electricity, safe electricity

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.