Thorium (pronounced /ˈθɔəriəm/, THOHR-ee-əm) is a chemical element with the symbol Th and atomic number 90.

Thorium is a naturally occurring, slightly radioactive metal. It is estimated to be about three to four times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust.

Thorium was successfully used as an alternative nuclear fuel to uranium in the molten-salt reactor experiment (MSR) from 1964 to 1969 to produce thermal energy, as well as in several light-water reactors using fuel composed of a mixture of 232Th and 233U, including the Shippingport Atomic Power Station (operation commenced 1957, decommissioned in 1982). Currently, officials in the Republic of India are advocating a thorium-based nuclear program, and a seed-and-blanket fuel utilizing thorium is undergoing irradiation testing at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow.[2][3] Advocates of the use of thorium as the fuel source for nuclear reactors state that they can be built to operate significantly cleaner than uranium based power plants as the waste products are much easier to handle.[4].......

Thorium, as well as uranium and plutonium, can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. A thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle, including greater abundance on Earth, superior physical and nuclear properties of fuel, enhanced proliferation resistance, and reduced nuclear waste production.

Thorium continues to be a tanatalising possibility for use in nuclear power reactors, though for many years India has been the only sponsor of major research efforts to use it, though other endeavours by Thorium Power (now Lightbridge Corporation) were focusing on Russian reactors.

In mid-2009, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) signed agreements with three Chinese entities to develop and demonstrate the use of thorium fuel in its CANDU reactors at Qinshan in China. This carries forward an earlier programme to utilise recycled PWR fuel in the Qinshan reactors. Another mid-2009 agreement, between Areva and Thorium Power, is to assess the use of thorium fuel in Areva's EPR, drawing upon earlier research.

The main attractive features are:

The possibility of utilising a very abundant resource which has hitherto been of so little interest that it has never been quantified properly.
The production of power with few long-lived transuranic elements in the waste.
Reduced radioactive wastes generally.

The problems include:

The high cost of fuel fabrication, due partly to the high radioactivity of U-233 chemically separated from the irradiated thorium fuel. Separated U-233 is always contaminated with traces of U-232 (69 year half-life but whose daughter products such as thallium-208 are strong gamma emitters with very short half-lives). Although this confers proliferation resistance to the fuel cycle, it results in increased costs.
The similar problems in recycling thorium itself due to highly radioactive Th-228 (an alpha emitter with two-year half life) present.
Some concern over weapons proliferation risk of U-233 (if it could be separated on its own), although many designs such as the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor address this concern.
The technical problems (not yet satisfactorily solved) in reprocessing solid fuels. However, with some designs, in particular the molten salt reactor (MSR), these problems are likely to largely disappear.

Much development work is still required before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialised, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. In this respect, recent international moves to bring India into the ambit of international trade might result in the country ceasing to persist with the thorium cycle, as it now has ready access to traded uranium and conventional reactor designs.

Nevertheless, the thorium fuel cycle, with its potential for breeding fuel without the need for fast neutron reactors, holds considerable potential in the long-term. It is a significant factor in the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy.

Thorium could cost a lot less than uranium fuel because it doesn’t need to be enriched to be used as fuel. As stated before, enriched uranium oxide gas costs $1633/kg, and 1-gigawatt nuclear power plants buy about $30 million in fuel annually, which works out to about 20,000 kg. You can read more at the wikipedia entry for the uranium market.

Even if the price of thorium never goes below $50/kg, it still represents a factor-of-32 economy improvement over uranium oxide. If a 1-gigawatt thorium reactor consumes amounts of thorium similar to the amount of uranium consumed by nuclear reactors today, fueling it for a year would only cost $1 milion, using the $50/kg price point, or $200,000, using the $10/kg price point.

Building a 1-gigawatt uranium plant today costs about $1.1 billion. Building a 1-gigawatt thorium plant will cost only about $250 million, or less, because meltdown concerns can be tossed out the window. This fundamentally changes the economics of nuclear power. We can call this the capital cost benefit of thorium.

Fueling a 1-gigawatt uranium plant today costs $30 million/year. Fueling a 1-gigawatt thorium plant will cost only $1 million/year, because thorium is four times more abundant than uranium and does not need to be enriched - only purified - prior to being used as fuel. We can call this the fuel cost benefit of thorium.

Staffing a 1-gigawatt uranium plant today costs $50 million/year. With greater automation, and (especially) fewer safety/security requirements, we will decrease that cost to $5 million/year. Instead of requiring 500 technicians, guards, personal assistants, janitors, and paper pushers to run a nuclear plant, we will only need a small group of 30 or so technicians to run the plant. (When the technology reaches maturity.) Generation IV nuclear plants will be designed to be low-maintenance.

Based on these numbers, over a 60-year operating lifetime, both plants produce 60 gigawatt-years of power. The total cost for the uranium plant is $4.9 billion, at a rate of $81.6 million per gigawatt-year. The total cost for the thorium plant is $490 million, at a rate of $8.16 million per gigawatt-year. Thorium power makes nuclear power ten times cheaper than it used to be, right off the bat.

Of course, ten times cheaper electricity is impressive, and blows everything else out of the water, but it doesn’t quite qualify as the “unlimited source of energy” I was talking about. Why will thorium lead to practically unlimited energy?

Because thorium reactorss will make nuclear reactors more decentralized. Because of no risk of proliferation or meltdown, thorium reactorss can be made of almost any size. A 500 ton, 100MW SSTAR-sized thorium reactor could fit in a large industrial room, require little maintenance, and only cost $25 million. A hypothetical 5 ton, truck-sized 1 MW thorium reactor might run for only $250,000 but would generate enough electricity for 1,000 people for the duration of its operating lifetime, using only 20 kg of thorium fuel per year, running almost automatically, and requiring safety checks as infrequently as once a year. That would be as little as $200/year after capital costs are paid off, for a thousand-persons worth of electricity! An annual visit by a safety inspector might add another $200 to the bill. A town of 1,000 could pool $250K for the reactor at the cost of $250 each, then pay $400/year collectively, or $0.40/year each for fuel and maintenance. These reactors could be built by the thousands, further driving down manufacturing costs.

Smaller reactors make power generation convenient in two ways: decreasing staffing costs by dropping them close to zero, and eliminating the bulky infrastructure required for larger plants. For this reason, it may be more likely that we see the construction of a million $40,000, 100 kW plants than 400 $300 million, 1GW plants. 100 kW plants would require minimal shielding and could be installed in private homes without fear of radiation poisoning. These small plants could be shielded so well that the level of radiation outside the shield is barely greater than the ambient level of radiation from traces of uranium in the environment. The only operating costs would be periodic safety checks, flouride salts, and thorium fuel. For a $40,000 reactor, and $1,000/year in operating costs, you get enough electricity for 100 people, which is enough to accomplish all sorts of antics, like running thousands of desktop nanofactories non-stop.

Making Thorium work on a commercial scale is complicated (far beyond the bounds of this letter). But I thought I'd mention it because it's an avenue Australia's mineral sands producers may have open to them in a few years. Thorium would go from being a toxic by product of zircon and rutile production, to a commercial product all its own.

According to GeoScience Australia, Australia has monazite resources of 5.2 million tonnes. With an estimated Thorium content of 7%, that gives Australia a Thorium resource of around 364,000 tonnes. Nolan's Bore-the location of Arafura's REO operations-is a Thorium hot bed.

Lightbridge Corp. is the only real pure play in thorium power today and the stars have lined up to push this company to the forefront of the rapidly growing nuclear power industry. Because Thorium reactors can’t suffer meltdowns, they are much cheaper to build.

Nuclear Power. Some discussion about nuclear power is needed. Fourth generation nuclear power has the potential to provide safe base-load electric power with negligible CO2 emissions.

All nuclear plants in the United States today are Light Water Reactors (LWRs), using ordinary water (as opposed to ‘heavy water’) to slow the neutrons and cool the reactor. Uranium is the fuel in all of these power plants. One basic problem with this approach is that more than 99% of the uranium fuel ends up ‘unburned’ (not fissioned). In addition to ‘throwing away’ most of the potential energy, the long-lived nuclear wastes (plutonium, americium, curium, etc.) require geologic isolation in repositories such as Yucca Mountain.

The other compelling alternative is to use thorium as the fuel in thermal reactors. Thorium can be used in ways that practically eliminate buildup of long-lived nuclear waste.
The United States chose the LWR development path in the 1950s for civilian nuclear power because research and development had already been done by the Navy, and it thus presented the shortest time-to-market of reactor concepts then under consideration. Little emphasis was given to the issues of nuclear waste. Today the situation is very different. If
nuclear energy is to be used widely to replace coal, in the United States and/or the developing world, issues of waste, safety, and proliferation become paramount. Nuclear power plants being built today, or in advanced stages of planning, in the United States, Europe, China and other places, are just improved LWRs.

The Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is a thorium reactor concept that uses a chemically-stable fluoride salt for the medium in which nuclear reactions take place. This fuel form yields flexibility of operation and eliminates the need to fabricate fuel elements.

This feature solves most concerns that have prevented thorium from being used in solidfueled reactors. The fluid fuel in LFTR is also easy to process and to separate useful fission products, both stable and radioactive. LFTR also has the potential to destroy existing nuclear waste, albeit with less efficiency than in a fast reactor such as IFR. Both IFR and LFTR operate at low pressure and high temperatures, unlike today’s LWR’s. Operation at low pressures alleviates much of the accident risk with LWR. Higher temperatures enable more of the reactor heat to be converted to electricity (40% in IFR, 50% in LFTR vs 35% in LWR). Both IFR and LFTR have the potential to be air-cooled and to use waste heat for desalinating water.

Both IFR and LFTR are 100-300 times more fuel efficient than LWRs. In addition to solving the nuclear waste problem, they can operate for several centuries using only uranium and thorium that has already been mined. Thus they eliminate the criticism that mining for nuclear fuel will use fossil fuels and add to the greenhouse effect.

The Obama campaign, properly in my opinion, opposed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. Indeed, there is a far more effective way to use the $25 billion collected from utilities over the past 40 years to deal with waste disposal. This fund should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the
creation of new long-lived nuclear waste. By law the federal government must take responsibility for existing spent nuclear fuel, so inaction is not an option. Accelerated development of fast and thorium reactors will allow the US to fulfill its obligations to dispose of the nuclear waste, and open up a source of carbon-free energy that can last centuries, even
millennia.

It is commonly assumed that 4th generation nuclear power will not be ready before 2030. That is a safe assumption under ‘business-as-usual”. However, given high priority it is likely that it could be available sooner. It is specious to argue that R&D on 4th generation nuclear power does not deserve support because energy efficiency and renewable energies may be able to satisfy all United States electrical energy needs. Who stands ready to ensure that energy needs of China and India will be entirely met by efficiency and renewables?

China and India have strong incentives to achieve pollution-free skies as well as avert dangerous climate change. The United States, even if efficiency and renewables can satisfy its energy needs (considered unlikely be many energy experts), needs to deal with its large piles of nuclear waste, which have lifetime exceeding 10,000 years.
Development of the first large 4th generation nuclear plants may proceed most rapidly if carried out in China or India (or South Korea, which has a significant R&D program), with the full technical cooperation of the United States and/or Europe.

Priorities, in order, for solving the climate and energy problems, while stimulating the economy are steps to: (1) improve energy efficiency, (2) develop and deploy renewable energies, (3) modernize and expand a ‘smart’ electric grid, (4) develop 4th generation nuclear power, (5) develop carbon capture and sequestration capability.

Prompt development of safe 4th generation nuclear power is needed to allow energy options for countries such as China and India, and for countries in the West in the event that energy efficiency and renewable energies cannot satisfy all energy requirements. Deployment of 4th generation nuclear power can be hastened via cooperation with China, India and other countries. It is essential that dogmatic ‘environmentalists’, opposed to all nuclear power, not be allowed to delay the R&D on 4th generation nuclear power. Thus it is desirable to avoid appointing to key energy positions persons with a history of opposition to nuclear power development. Of course, deployment of nuclear power is an option, and some countries or regions may prefer to rely entirely on other energy sources, but opponents of nuclear power should not be allowed to deny that option to everyone.

Frank communication with the public is essential. At present, all around the world, many governments are guilty of greenwash, an implausible approach of goals and halfmeasures that will barely slow the growth of CO2. The world, not just the United States, needs an open honest discussion of what is needed. It is a tremendous burden to place on the President-elect. The only chance seems to be if he understands the truth – the whole truth.

The construction of the AHWR in the 11th Plan period (2007-2012) will signal the beginning of the third stage of the country’s nuclear power programme. The first stage is in commercial domain, with 15 PHWRs that use natural uranium as fuel, operating in different parts of the country.

Besides, India has two Boiling Water Reactors at Tarapur, Maharashtra.

The second stage, which envisages the building of Fast Breeder Reactors, has begun with the construction of a 500-MWe Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu.

Just wanted to say im enjoying the thread riggers. Need to take more time to research this area further and the links here are a great way to do that. Cheers

Richard Denning, a professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State University who studies the safety of nuclear reactor designs, agreed that uranium is a proven technology that is here to stay.

"Right now, we're so into the fuel cycle," he said. "There is enough uranium to fuel the next generation of plants, which will look much like the last generation."

Sorensen and others warn that if we don't invest in thorium, others will beat us to it. In addition to India, which is pursuing less-efficient, water-cooled thorium reactors, he said, the Czech Republic is exploring liquid fluoride thorium reactors similar to reactors tested at Oak Ridge.........

With the United States holding 16 percent of the world's thorium supply - about 1.4 million tons - he said, there is enough to power the country safely for thousands of years.

"We're not advocating that we build a full power plant or reactor," said George Schmidt, deputy director for research and technology at NASA Glenn. "We think it deserves some attention from an R&D standpoint to really look at the performance of the system and see if it does live up to its great advantages."

The Department of Energy approved $200,000 in funding at Oak Ridge for analytical studies this year of molten salt reactors using thorium and uranium, a department spokeswoman said.

In 2008, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada., introduced a bill that would direct thorium research begin at the Idaho National Laboratory. They introduced a new bill last week.

Technological and Strategic Highlights:

Completion of a preliminary analysis for a VVER-1000 fuel assembly design for an 18-month fuel cycle;

A strategic agreement with SOSNY, the Company's prime contractor in Russia to manage the research and development
activities related to the lead test assembly ("LTA") program for Russian-designed VVER-1000 reactors;

Continued expansion of work with AREVA on fuel design;

An S-3 Shelf Registration Statement with the SEC to provide future capital raising flexibility;

Listing of the Company's common shares on the NASDAQ Capital Market and completion of a 1-for-30 reverse stock
split;

Effective March 21, 2010, Lightbridge will be added to the World Nuclear Association's (WNA) Nuclear Energy Index;
the WNA Nuclear Energy Index is a capitalization-weighted, float-adjusted index of the most prominent nuclear energy
stocks in the world;

Received an unqualified opinion on the Company's Sarbanes Oxley compliance for internal controls over financial reporting;

Recent introduction of the Thorium Energy Security Act of 2010, presented by Sen. Orin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Harry
Reid (D-Nev.), to accelerate the use of thorium-based nuclear fuel in existing and future international reactors

Then there is Australia as previuosly mentioned Australia has an abundance that was noted in a September 2007 report to Parliament, but as yet little interest other than from places like the Daily Reckoning

http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/thorium/2008/07/02/

Using LFTR, we can:

- solve the current ETS “problem”

- convert all our coal and natural gas powered plants, cutting their carbon emissions by 99%

- eliminate 275 million tonnes of annual emissions, forever

- upgrade coal for export (made possible by the LFTR) and eliminate another 55 million tonnes – the coal industry pocketing 5.5 billion dollars of export earnings yearly for its trouble

- revitalise power generation, freeing it from worries about carbon emissions

- quit worrying about safety – no meltdowns, boiler explosions, etc

- power Australia while producing merely 48 tonnes of by-product per year (12 bathtubs of valuable, reusable and recyclable by-product, for such uses as lightbulbs, catalytic converters and jewellery)

MCLEAN, Va., Jun 23, 2010 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Lightbridge Corporation /quotes/comstock/15*!ltbr/quotes/nls/ltbr (LTBR 9.49, +3.58, +60.58%) , the leading developer of non-proliferative nuclear fuel technology and provider of comprehensive advisory services for civil nuclear energy programs, today announced a major technological breakthrough that has the potential to transform the nuclear power industry. Lightbridge's new fuel technology based on a proprietary all-metal fuel assembly design could reduce both initial capital costs per megawatt and annual operating costs per kilowatt-hour of nuclear power, making it more competitive with other forms of electricity generation while contributing to a significant reduction of CO2 emissions.

It is expected that Lightbridge's all-metal fuel technology could be applied to currently operating or new light water reactors as well as small modular reactors which provide the same benefits as in larger commercial nuclear power plants. It is also highly synergistic with fast reactor fuel designs.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/lightbrid...nk=MW_news_stmp

+60%

I looked at this stock after looking at this thread just now. This is a valuable thread.