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Glancing through the objections, the non-political ones all seem to boil down to "We don't actually know that they work at commercial scales, because we've never used them at commercial scale before." Well... yeah... but as an objections go, it's hard to imagine a much weaker one. If that's the best technical argument the detractors have, that says quite a lot about their arguing position. On the other hand, they seem to have the potential to fix some very real objections to nuclear power from the uranium cycle.

If that's the best technical argument the detractors have, that says quite a lot about their arguing position.

I'm surprised, jerf, to see this kind of comment coming from you (as I take care to follow your comments on HN). If investors are only interested in a technology after the government lavishes your tax dollars and mine on developing it, to me the technology is surely less promising than a technology that develops mostly through private investment. People spending their own money usually does better at identifying technologies with a large upside than efforts to get government backing for this or that "strategic" or "breakthrough" technology.

The current way that objections to nuclear power from the uranium cycle (the kind of power I enjoy here as I type this) are usually dealt with is try any and every technology other than nuclear power. I agree with the statements in this thread that "nuclear" by itself isn't a label that indicates that the power source is bad, but I point out that private investors seem to be seeking to invest in a lot of other kinds of power sources more than they are seeking to invest in thorium.

AFTER EDIT: I spent a while just now searching for a linkable version of the special report on the world natural gas market published in The Economist a few months ago. (I don't know what prompted the downvote that came while I was doing that.) I haven't found a link yet, but I have to recommend that special report section of the print edition of The Economist to anyone who hasn't had a chance to read it yet.

The statement from my top-level comment above that I'm being asked to defend is "I'm not aware of any part of the world where local politics would make a thorium plant more likely than another wind power plant or natural-gas-fired power plant. So maybe thorium power generation is a technical solution looking for a problem." But I'll come right back at anyone who claims that thorium power has a big future by asking, do you have a solid estimate how much it will cost to produce electricity with thorium, considering the entire technological process from mining to by-product disposal? The production of natural gas by "fracking" is revolutionizing the world energy economy

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21569037-why-worlds-m...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21569039-europes-ener...

and has probably given the development of renewable energy sources two extra decades to become economically competitive. That's enough. Green energy development is a necessity around the world,

http://www.economist.com/node/21556904

and all the other modalities will be researched and receive further commercial development. By the time thorium power could come on line, you and I and everybody will have renewable energy at competitive cost, with natural gas having bridged the transition.

AFTER SECOND EDIT: Thanks for your reply, jerf, which was posted as I was writing my first edit. Every which kind of power generation, as the references I've just added to this comment make clear, is developing in a market distorted by tax-funded subsidies. Better to let purer market forces sort out the trade-offs among different energy sources. I was just reminded that pg, our site founder, has been following this industry for a long time.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ladder.html

"After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way."

My comment is that any Baby Boomer who read about physics as a kid (like me) heard about thorium DECADES ago, and has heard thorium repeatedly mentioned as the energy source of the future, a future that never comes. Paul Graham's dad worked for one company in the power industry, and my late dad the industrial engineer worked for another company in the industry, manufacturing electric generators for power plants. The power sources that spin electric generators were always dinner table conversation in my home when I was growing up. I think thorium is a very interesting fissile element, but my person guess about future power development is that there will never be a thorium power plant in Japan, in Germany, in the United States, or even in nuclear-plant-friendly France.

The post you're responding to doesn't even mention government investment; it simply says it's silly to be skeptical of a technology because you don't know that it will work at commercial scale before trying it at commercial scale, because this is true of literally every technological innovation ever, regardless of whether it's publicly or privately funded.

All existing nuclear reactors were only developed because the government lavished your tax dollars and mine on developing it. What's your point?

I did limit myself to the non-political issues. Political problems need political solutions. I'm personally more interested in the foundational problem of do they even work, technically and economically. If not, that eliminates the need to consider the political case at all. And the political issue ends up sort of circular; we can't build them, because we can't build them, because we can't build them. Not interesting to me personally. YMMV (no sarcasm).

The whole private vs. public issue is really obscured by the extreme, extreme regulation surrounding the entire area. I suspect it's overkill, while at the same time I can't deny one does not want to live anywhere near an unsafe power generation facility. (I did start to say "nuclear reactor", but it's more general than that, really.)

You know, a lot of private investors dumped a lot of money in the dot-com boom also. Everyone has heard stories like "If you would have invested $100 in Polaroid / Apple / what have you when they first started you would be a millionaire right now". That kind of thinking drove the dot-com era, and I think it is the same kind that is driving the alternative energy market. Many sources won't make it, but some will probably make it big.

Hey Strawman! Let's not compare investment in new, non-mature businesses like dot-com businesses in 2000 for which almost none of them had any sound profit building plans, with the energy market, which is a very well known industry with clear, regular paying customers.

I'm not drawing a comparison between the business models, I'm just pointing out that often times investors will jump on something that is "the future" even if the risk is high, because the rewards for success are even higher. So how is that a strawman?

Because you are comparing two very different situations and saying "the same kind that is driving the alternative energy market". The dot-com era investment was born out of the anticipation that the Internet was somehow going to revolutionize everything and that investing now would be rewarded at a later date, even if the business did not even any idea how to make money then. The energy market is not driven by the same investors, not the same companies. Energy groups are multi-national companies generations dozens of billions of revenues, and they are the ones funding the future initiatives, and I seriously doubt anyone could kickstart their way in the energy market because of the investments required to start anything from scratch.

There is nothing that could be as remote as these two markets.

An MSR reactor investment is not at all like a dot-com investment. One can use science and math to determine the facts about what an MSR can and cannot do.

Honestly, in this case I'd much rather trust the government (more specifically, certain sects of it) than investors in choosing and funding technologies. The government may be corrupt and unwieldy and inefficient, but it is operating on (I would argue) a better feedback loop that acts on much more data (not only scientific, but social as well) and with a much better scientific workforce.

Take a look at what DARPA is investing in now: http://www.darpa.mil/our_work/

While much of it is unfortunately directed in part towards destruction and warfare, the projects are above and beyond what investors are investing in.

Just a quick look at the Microsystems group projects: "The Casimir Effect Enhancement (CEE) program seeks to manipulate forces very near surfaces to enable control of small-scale phenomena, including nanodevice adhesion and friction. The objectives of this single-phase DARPA program are to demonstrate unambiguous detection, neutralization, and dynamic manipulation of the Casimir force to modulate between normal and neutralized states. Some approaches to these program goals include the development of new materials, engineered nanostructures, or active elements. Recent research activities (models and experiments) have already identified manipulation of the Casimir force as an important challenge."

Edit: To clarify the feedback loop comment: I think the jury is still out on the effect of economic incentives. In my opinion, looking at the degradation of privately funded pure research over the last 30-40 years (Bell, Xerox PARC, etc), economic incentives are only effective once someone (usually academia funded by the gov't) has laid the ground work. Investors will not do that.

It would seem to me that uranium-based nuclear power itself would never have been developed or commercialized (indeed as a byproduct of the military use first being developed) without massive government investment.

I don't see this argument as a specific counterpoint to Thorium-based nuclear power. That said, I am not particularly informed as to the benefits or drawbacks of Thorium -- I'm just observing that the counter-arguments don't seem to be particularly specific to Thorium and could have easily been applied to Uranium-based nuclear power had this been 1932 instead of 2012.

Not necessarily disagreeing with your main thrust, but this sentence: "So maybe thorium power generation is a technical solution looking for a problem." goes a bit too far. Certainly, there are it might be a political solution in search of a problem, but there are technical problems around waste, proliferation, and safety that MSRs at least attempt to address, and they also don't produce greenhouse gases the way fossil-fuel-driven generators do, and have fewer outstanding technical question-marks than renewables (at least as baseload power, a role for which huge technical challenges will need to be solved before they can be considered viable). That still may not be good enough, but there are clearly problems in current energy production that will need to be solved somehow.

Also, aside: that guardian article isn't terrible, but the author gets half-lives backwards the way lots of authors seem to, implying that elements with long half-lives are bad, I suppose because we'll need to bury them for longer. It's the elements with short half-lives that are scary; they decay really fast and give people radiation poisoning/cancer/whatever. An element with a 16-million-year half-life is barely emitting anything at all; that's the category of waste that can, as the author of this post says, be buried in a shallow pit in the desert.

The main problem I see nuclear having is its image, it is for that which MSRs could potentially provide a solution.

I would argue that for the purpose of nuclear waste disposal the relation between half life and problem is a bit more complicated than "getting it backwards." The short half life isotopes are easily disposed of, because we know how to build an organizational structure, that oversees the disposal. For example, to securely store nuclear waste with an half life of a decade on can simply coat it in some plastic and put it in a mine with a warning nailed to the entrance. With very large half life times on the other hand there is no big problem to begin with, as you stated.

But the intermediate timescale poses problems, since there the nuclear waste is radioactive enough to be dangerous and we do not have a good idea how a facility looks like, that can survive one hundred thousand years.

Yes, I was mostly just pointing out that the "Ooh! 16 million years! Scary!" attitude is bothersome, but you're right that I'm over-simplifying. My recollection was that the thorium cycle produces a mix of very-short-lived, deadly, gamma-emitting isotopes (U-232, I think? and possibly others) and very-long-lived, low-risk stuff, with less intermediate-half-life transuranic material left over, which made it rather preferable to the uranium fuel cycle as far as waste disposal was concerned, but I may be misremembering. Either way, the Guardian article doesn't deal with the issue in much depth or in a way that makes it sound like they know what they're talking about, so I don't trust their assessment of the relative merits of LFTRs vs. conventional uranium LWRs.

Most of the links you give talks primarily about thorium as an alternative fuel in traditional nuclear reactors, which is not what this article talks about. It talks primarily about Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors which are entirely differently to current reactors, which are all solid-state reactors.

It's really sad to see the different topics gets confused, because they are really different. Thorium as an alternative fuel doesn't really solve much, besides it's maybe cheaper for some countries. Of course the entire expression "Thorium reactors" are somewhat at fault. It's incredible ambiguous, especially when people inside the current nuclear establishment talks about using thorium in (slightly modified) traditional nuclear reactors, such Pressurized Water Reactors.

Of course there are many things which can be said against LFTRs, mostly that it's still an unproven technology. Sadly it'll stay that way if nobody does something about it.

The energyfromthorium.com rebuttal of the IEER report is interesting reading as well.

http://energyfromthorium.com/ieer-rebuttal/

They take issue with the IEER report judging thorium as a fuel when they are mostly talking about it in a solid fuel reactor. I can't think of any thorium proponents who are proposing solid fuel thorium reactors. The excitement they have over thorium is almost entirely over its use in the LFTR reactor design (which is not without its own design problems but those are distinct from a solid fuel thorium reactor).

Thanks for reminding of the increasingly economical non-nuclear non-fossil options.

On the matter of Minnesota nuclear plants: I would caution that the perceived cheap power is a result of significant expenses born by the populous as a whole decades ago... expenses that aren't in your power bill today but worth remembering. And similarly, there will eventually be significant expenses born by society as a whole to deal with the waste.

The fact that waste is piling up at all reactor sites---and don't think that's not a hazard in natural disaster/accident situations, let alone targeted strikes---means there is a significant not-yet-quantifiable cost uncertainty inherent to nuclear power.

Cost uncertainty has to be thought of as a significant cost, even higher than the potential cost will actually turn out to be, since we need to assume the worst when we don't know.

Thus if we really want to talk about the true cost of existing nuclear power: it's far higher than what you're paying today per KWh

First, the government spent all that money for their own purposes. The design and construction of commercial Nuclear Power Plants has been on the user since day one. also, NPPs have been paying into a fund to handle Spent Nuclear Fuel. There is plenty of money to handle it, except that government can spend way more on anything than any rational person can imagine.

The fed gov has spent ~$16B on "renewable energy" recently. With 1/10th that money, LFTRs could have been coming off the assembly line at 100MW/day by now. And those plants could be eliminating that SNF as we speak.

The article is more about molten salt reactors than thorium as a fuel. The benefits listed are from using molten salt, not thorium.

The NPR story adds to the original article — the experimental thorium reactor ran for 14 years, not 4. The head of the project was fired by Nixon (hardly a big strike against him).

It seems to me that the NPR show simply raised two objections:

1) you still have nuclear waste — less than with current reactors but arguable how much less.

2) it does not stop nuclear proliferation (this was a heated discussion point with the thorium advocate arguing that it is much harder to harvest U233 from an MSR than plutonium or enriched uranium from other sources and the anti-nuclear guy citing a paper suggesting it's easier. (U233 is easier to make a bomb with than plutonium - i did not know this.)

It it noteworthy to remember that the reason LFTR advocates says that LFTR reactors will stop nuclear proliferation is that all the U233 will be comtaminated with the highly radioactive U232 isotope. To extract U233 from the active core of an LFTR would take just as much engineering as normal enrichment plants, if not more. The current enrichment plants would never allow U232 inside their plants since it is so difficult and dangerous.

Of course that's all hearsay from the LFTR advocates :P

Nope, it is one of the main reasons why Thorium is not that great in typical solid fuel reactors. Lots of experience there. Processing the fuel to extract and use the U233 is rather a bothersome thing to do.

Some argument on Thorium from Indian Physicists http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/article26201...