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SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy

Source for the Future Author: Richard Martin

Publisher: Palgrave MacmillanPages: 272

Price ( Hardcover ): $27.00Publication Date: May 8, 2012

ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-230-11647-4Category: Nonfiction

“Bringing back to light a long-lost technology that should never have been lost, this fascinating, impor-tant biography of thorium also brings us a commodity that’s rare in discussions of energy and climate change: hope.”

—CHRIS ANDERSONEditor in Chief, Wired

Author, The Long Tail and Free

—JOHN HOFMEISTER Former President, Shell Oil Company

Author, Why We Hate the Oil Companies Founder/CEO, Citizens for Affordable Energy

“Richard Martin tells a story that needs to be understood, for our future energy supplies rely upon hard choices. Martin makes at least one of those difficult decisions ever so much easier by educating us on our troubled history and experience with nuclear energy, and even more importantly for the future development of this essential source of 21st Century clean energy. This is the type of book that can make a difference!"

“Thorium is the younger sister to uranium, less volatile, slower to self-con-sume, and as many have contended without success, much better suited as a source of nuclear power than uranium. SuperFuel by award-winning science writer Richard Martin tells the Cinderella story of thorium in a fast-paced, insider's account. This short, well-written book is a must read for those interested in understanding thorium's past and its potential to be a clean, renewable energy source for the future.”

—C YNTHIA KELLYPresident, Atomic Heritage Foundation

"Richard Martin has done an exemplary job of exploring a technically de-manding subject in a gripping narrative form. The implications of this subject could not be more vital—for oil prices, energy security, the chances of coping with climate change—and SuperFuel clearly and fairly spells out the reasons for both optimism and for caution. If every technical book were written in this clear and engaging a style, we'd all be a lot better in-formed! I am very glad to have read this book."

—JAMES FALLOWSThe Atlantic

Author, China Airborne

One day in June

2009, I hiked along

the Clinch River in

northern Tennessee

to what was once

supposed to be the

site of the most ad-

vanced nuclear power plant in the world.

With my companions—John Kutsch, the own-

er of an engineering design firm in Chicago;

Bruce Patton, a scientist at Oak Ridge Nation-

al Laboratory, 30 miles or so up the road; and

Kirk Sorensen, an engineer at the Marshall

Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama—I

clambered over a dilapidated chain-link fence

and walked down the dirt road that followed

the meandering river. It was the first really

steamy day of summer. The woods were loud

with crickets and desultory birdsong, and a

double-crested cormorant launched itself off

the surface of the sluggish river. We were tres-

passing on federal property, but it seemed un-

likely that anyone would care. We passed the

foundation of an old guard shack covered in

foliage. It was like the setting for a postapoca-

lyptic movie, except we weren’t being pursued

by zombies.

After a mile or so we came to a wide

clearing on the inner curve of a horseshoe

bend in the river. Obviously manmade, it was

E x c e r p tempty save for grass and gravel and a few ar-

borvitae trees. Nothing stirred.

“Eight billion dollars,” said Sorensen.

“That’s what you’re looking at.”

What we were looking at was the aban-

doned site of the Clinch River Breeder Reac-

tor. Planned in the 1960s, Clinch River was

originally conceived as the prototype of a new

class of futuristic nuclear reactors that would

create more fuel than they consumed. The

project officially began in 1970 and finally was

abandoned in 1983, after innumerable stud-

ies, reports, and rhetoric, plus the eight bil-

lion Sorensen mentioned. Once advertised as

the future of power generation in the United

States, Clinch River is now synonymous with

technological hubris and the failed promise of

atomic power. We were standing in the grave-

yard of the U.S. nuclear power industry.

As we ambled back toward our cars,

Sorensen—who at that time was studying for

an master’s in nuclear engineering at the Uni-

versity of Tennessee—talked about the folly of

U.S. nuclear policy and about the little-known

element that could transform it.

“Thorium was the alternate path,” he

said. “It’s a safer, more abundant fuel that

could’ve revolutionized nuclear power. The

problem is, it has almost nothing in common

with what we’re doing now.”

A b o u t t h i s B o o kAccording to the International Energy Agency, worldwide demand for energy will rise by nearly 40 percent by 2035—a figure that many analysts, citing booming economic growth in the nations of China, India, and Brazil, consider low. Meeting that de-mand with current energy technologies will result in the addition of many billions of tons of carbon into Earth’s atmosphere. Yet to build enough wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects to significantly reduce coal and oil use would require time and re-sources we simply do not have. There is a solution—a form of nuclear power produced with thorium, a naturally-occurring ele-ment that is so safe you can hold it in your bare hand, that’s four times more abundant than uranium, and that’s so dense and highly efficient, a ball bearing-sized amount could provide all the power an average person will consume in their lifetime. Furthermore, innovative liquid-fueled thorium reactors are 200 to 300 times more fuel-efficient than standard reac-tors and so small and portable they can be mass-pro-duced in factories. Thorium reactors will also solve the problems of nuclear waste and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction: you can't make a bomb with thorium, and liquid-fueled thorium reac-tors can actually burn waste from existing, conven-tional reactors.

So why aren’t we using it now?That is the puzzle that led one of America’s leading energy writers, Richard Martin, to conduct a three-year investigation into the secret history of one of the greatest technological missteps of the 20th century:

the decision in the early 1970s to abandon R&D on thorium power, despite ample proof of its low cost, safety, and efficacy. Based on groundbreaking archival research and hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews, Martin’s game-changing new book—SuperFuel: Thorium, The Green Energy Source for the Future—provides a gripping untold story of the science, the personali-ties, and the political, military and economic forces that shaped American nuclear power policy and ulti-mately led to the energy crisis we face today. The most important science and technology book of the year, SuperFuel also brings us word of the global thorium revival movement in progress, pow-ered by a new generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have put their careers and their reputations on the line to battle the nuclear power establishment and bring thorium back on line.

POST SCRIPTSeveral countries, including waking giants India and China, have announced or confirmed plans to build thorium power reactors. The U.S. is not among them. In the last year China has made clear its in-tention to become a major supplier of nuclear tech-nology on the world market, focusing in part on liquid-fuel reactors using thorium. Those reactors are inherently safe, meaning that a meltdown or oth-er out-of-control accident is physically impossible. Meanwhile, the United States, which pioneered the development of thorium reactors a half-century ago, continues to pursue the failed nuclear power strate-gies of the 1970s.

A u t h o r R i c h a r d M a r t i n

Award-winning journalist Richard Martin has

been covering the energy landscape for nearly two

decades. A contributing editor for Wired since

2002, he has written about energy, technology,

and international affairs for Time, Fortune, The

Atlantic, and the Asian Wall Street Journal, and

many other publications. The editorial director

for Pike Research, the leading cleantech research

and analysis firm, he blogs regularly on the future

of energy for Forbes.com. He is the former Tech-

nology Producer for ABCNews.com, Technology

Editor for The Industry Standard (2000-2001),

and Editor-at-Large for Information Week (2005-

2008).

Martin’s writing on the future of energy

has taken him around the world. In 1997 he spent

three months in Aerbaijan and Kazakhstan, as one

of the first western journalists to report on the last

great oil rush of the 20th century, the Caspian Sea

oil boom. Shortly after 9/11/2001, he traveled to

London to profile Shell’s futurists, the Scenario

Group, for Business 2.0. In Canada’s far north,

Martin descended 600 feet underground for a rare

close-up of the world’s richest uranium mine, and

he travelled across Alaska’s forbidding North Slope

to report on new horizontal drilling techniques

for extracting oil from under the permafrost near

the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In December

2009, he broke the news of the thorium revival in

a groundbreaking article for Wired.

Among other honors, Martin is the recipi-

ent of the “Excellence in Feature Writing” Award

from the Society for Professional Journalists and

the White Award for Investigative Reporting. His

article, “The God Particle & the Grid,” published

by Wired, was selected for Best Science Writing

of 2004. Educated at Yale and the University of

Hong Kong, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his

wife and son.

W h a t I s T h o r i u m ?Thorium is a lustrous sil-

very-white metal, denser

than lead, that occurs

in great abundance in

Earth’s crust. Its atomic

number—the number

of protons in an atom’s

nucleus—is 90. On the periodic table

it’s found on the bottom row, along with the other

heavy radioactive elements, or actinides—protac-

tinium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, and so

on. With an atomic weight of 232, it is the second-

heaviest element found in measurable amounts

in nature, behind uranium.

Thorium is around four times as abun-

dant as uranium and about as common as lead.

Used properly, thorium is far safer and cleaner as

a nuclear fuel than uranium. Thorium’s half-life,

the time it takes for half of the atoms in any sam-

ple to disintegrate, is roughly 14.05 billion years,

slightly more than the age of the universe; the

half-life of uranium is 4.07 billion years. The lon-

ger the half-life, the lower the radioactivity and

the lower the danger of exposure from radiation.

Thorium’s rate of decay is so slow that it can al-

most be considered stable; it’s not fissile (able to

sustain a nuclear chain reaction on its own), but

it is fertile, meaning that it can be converted into

a fissile isotope of uranium, U-233, through neu-

tron capture, also known as “breeding.” You can’t

mash together two lumps of thorium, even highly

purified thorium, and trigger a nuclear explosion.

Left alone, a chunk of thorium is no more harmful

than a bar of soap. In fact, for a period before World

War II, a thorium-laced toothpaste was marketed

in Germany under the brand name “Doramad.”

Because of its unusually long decay process

and its rare ability to breed through neutron cap-

ture, thorium is a more energy-dense and efficient

source of energy than uranium or plutonium: As

a nuclear fuel, thorium reserves carry enough en-

ergy to power humanity’s machines for many mil-

lennia into the future.

Nuclear waste from the thorium fuel cycle

is also less hazardous to future generations. Fluid-

fueled reactors known as liquid fluoride thorium

reactors (LFTRs, pronounced lifters) can act as

breeders, producing as much fuel as they con-

sume. In LFTRs, thorium offers what nuclear reac-

tor designers call higher burnup—there’s less of it

in terms of volume and less long-lived radioactive

wastes to deal with afterward than uranium. They

can even consume highly enriched fissile material

from dismantled warheads and toxic elements in

spent fuel from other reactors, turning it into a

relatively benign and shorter-lived form of spent

fuel, thus eliminating the need for geologic stor-

age for thousands of years. What’s more, LFTRs

are inherently safe: The fission reactions occur in a

radioactive cocktail of molten salt containing ura-

nium-233 and jacketed by a blanket of thorium for

breeding; when the fuel heats up it expands, slow-

ing the rate of fission reactions and cooling itself.

A meltdown is physically impossible.

T i m e l i n eSelec ted fac ts from the book for reference only.For full details, please refer to the book.

1828 Thorium is discovered by Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius—40 years after uranium and 66 years before radiation. 1830s Gas lighting, which became widespread in the first two decades of the 19th century, illuminates many of the streets in Paris. Thorium is used in mantles for gas streetlights.

1896 Henri Becquerel accidentally discovers radiation.

1898 German chemist Gerhard Carl Schmidt discovers that thorium is radioactive.

1898In a series of famous experiments on a variety of sub-stances including uranium and thorium, Marie Curie establishes the basic properties of radioactivity.

1901Noticing that thorium seems to emit a gaseous sub-stance distinct from the thorium itself, Ernest Ruth-erford and his colleague Frederic Soddy discover the principle of atomic decay.

1909Frederic Soddy publishes a paper claiming various medical benefits for “radio-thorium,” which he de-scribes as a rival and replacement for radium.

1933Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard realizes the possibility of the nuclear chain reaction.

1939 In a paper entitled “Resonance in uranium and tho-rium disintegrations and the phenomenon of nuclear fission,” Niels Bohr lays out the properties of explosive nuclear fission in enriched uranium.

1941 Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, isolates uranium-233, a decay product of thorium, calling it “a $50 quadrillion discovery.” FDR authorizes the Man-hattan Engineering District, later called the Manhattan Project, for the purpose of creating an atomic bomb.

1942 The production of plutonium and enriched uranium for the bomb’s core are assigned to the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. The Penta-gon creates the Clinton Laboratory, later Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outside Knoxville, Tennessee, to serve as one of three primary research-and-develop-ment centers for the Manhattan Project. The first re-search director is physicist Eugene Wigner, winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for physics, who brings with him Alvin Weinberg and a cadre of the best nuclear scien-tists from the Metallurgical Lab.

1943 Wigner conceives the “aqueous homogenous” reactor, which could bombard a blanket of thorium-232 to cre-ate fissile U233 in its core.

1944 As Allied troops advance on Berlin, American agents in France learn that the Germans have raided the world’s largest stockpile of thorium from a French firm when they occupied Paris, and shipped hundreds of tons of thorium east into the Reich.

1945 On August 6, the first atomic bomb, known as Little Boy, a gun-type fission weapon made with urani-um-235, is dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, an implosion-type nuclear weapon known as Fat Boy, using plutonium-239, is dropped on Nagasaki. The “New Piles Committee,” an offshoot of the Manhattan Project, is formed to develop new reactor technology including thorium-fueled systems.

1946 Along with Wigner, Weinberg works out the basic design of the light water reactor, which becomes the de facto standard for the world’s nuclear plants. The Atomic Energy Commission is formed, with former Tennessee Valley Authority president David Lilienthal as its first chair. Weinberg campaigns unsuccessfully to institute civilian control over the new AEC. President Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which “does not in any respect diminish the dominance of the military in nuclear affairs,” Weinberg writes at the time.

1948 Named associate director of Oak Ridge National Lab-oratory, Alvin Weinberg sets out to build a thorium-based, liquid-fuel reactor.

1954The United States launches the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. The Nau-tilus’ reactor is based on the light-water designs of Wigner and Weinberg. The Aircraft Reactor Experi-ment, a precursor to the molten salt reactor, operates successfully at Oak Ridge.

1955Alvin Weinberg becomes director of Oak Ridge Nation-al Laboratory. Responding to reports of a Soviet pow-er-generating reactor, AEC chairman Lewis Strauss calls for the development of a commercial breeder. That project, on the shore of Lake Erie, will become the ill-fated Fermi 1 liquid metal breeder reactor, and misguided efforts to build uranium-fueled breeder re-actors will ultimately doom Weinberg’s thorium-based MSR.

1956The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment is funded at $2 million a year. With an annual budget of $60 million and staff of 4300, Oak Ridge National Laboratory be-comes the largest nuclear energy laboratory in the U.S. and among the half-dozen largest technical institutions in the world.

1958 Weinberg publishes an essay entitled “Power Breeding as a National Objective,’ in which he argues that “cur-rent economics alone should not be the sole basis for choosing which reactor system to pursue. … Efficient use of the raw materials of nuclear energy—uranium

and thorium—is equally important.” Also that year, Fluid Fuel Reactors, summarizing the work at Oak Ridge on advanced reactors with fluid cores, is pub-lished by the Atomic Energy Commission. during the Atoms for Peace era under President Dwight D. Eisen-hower.

1959 A report from the Atomic Energy Commission exam-ines three competing next-generation reactor designs and concludes that “The Molten Salt Reactor has the highest probability of achieving technical feasibility."

1960Homi Bhabha, the father of atomic power in India, develops and begins to promote his “three-stage pro-gram” to develop homegrown thorium reactors in In-dia.

1965 The Molten Salt Reactor at Oak Ridge goes critical and runs successfully, with minimal downtime, through the remainder of the decade.

1966 Bhabha is killed in a plane crash in Switzerland.

1968 The MSR becomes the first reactor to run on urani-um-233, derived from thorium.

1969 In December, the MSR is shut down to make way for what Weinberg believed would be more advanced mol-ten salt designs and a full-fledged demonstration plant.

1972 In his first-ever special presidential message to Con-gress on energy, President Nixon declares that “Our best hope today for meeting the nation’s growing de-mand for economical clean energy lies with the fast breeder reactor.” Nixon requests $27 million for the liquid metal fast breeder reactor effort. Despite the success of the MSR experiment, AEC reactor technol-ogy chief Milton Shaw issues a series of critical assess-ments of the technology.

1973The Molten Salt Reactor program is canceled. The U.S. nuclear industry signs contracts for 41 new nuke plants—all uranium-powered light-water reactors—the

industry’s high-water mark. Alvin Weinberg, a leading voice for nuclear safety and the father of the molten salt reactor, is dismissed as director of Oak Ridge Na-tional Laboratory.

1974 The Molten Salt Reactor program is briefly reinstated.

1976 The Molten Salt Reactor program is terminated per-manently.

1977 The Shippingport Reactor, in Pennsylvania, becomes the first commercial reactor to use thorium.

1979 The Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown on March 28, 1979, becomes the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power and leads to the end of commercial nu-clear power development in the U.S.

1982 Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine, is forced to retire. Two years later former President Jimmy Carter recalls that Rickover had told him, “I wish that nuclear power had never been discov-ered.”

1983 Pursued in lieu of liquid-fuel thorium reactors, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor is canceled after nearly 20 years of research and development costing $8 bil-lion.

1986 The Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine is the worst nu-clear accident in history, and is one of only two clas-sified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011).

1992 Alvin Radkowsky founds Thorium Power Ltd. to de-velop solid-fuel thorium technology.

2000Kirk Sorensen stumbles on a copy of the book, Fluid Fuel Reactors, published by the Atomic Energy Com-mission in 1958.

2002 Thorium Power goes public.

2006Weinberg dies at 91. Kirk Sorensen starts the blog, En-ergy from Thorium, as a “location for discussion and education about the value of thorium as a future energy source.”

2008India, which has publicly announced its intention to pursue Homi Bhabha’s three-stage program for thori-um reactors, signs a new nuclear treaty with the United States.

2009The non-profit Thorium Energy Alliance is formed to spur the development of thorium-based nuclear power. The Thorium Energy Independence Act is introduced in Congress. The bill fails multiple times to make it out of committee.

2010The Obama Administration forms the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.

2011An earthquake and tsunami strike Japan, setting off the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. In the wake of the Fukushima accident, several nations including Ger-many decide to forego nuclear power altogether. China announces its intention to build a liquid-fuel thorium reactor, becoming the first country to officially do so. Kirk Sorensen leaves Teledyne Brown to found Flibe Energy, a company created to build liquid-fuel thorium reactors. Thorium power R&D programs are underway in Brazil, Russia, Japan, the Czech Republic, France, Norway and other countries. The Baroness Bryony Worthington, the youngest member of the House of Lords, founds the Weinberg Foundation in London to promote the development of thorium power.

2012Two dozen members of the U.K. Parliament from all major parties form a committee to study the potential of thorium reactors.

2035According to the International Energy Agency, world-wide demand for energy is expected to rise by nearly 40 percent—a figure that many analysts consider low.