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We cannot continue to improve the condition of people throughout the word without use of nuclear power. None of the renewable energy solutions can be scaled quickly enough to meet current and future energy needs. Alternative Energy solutions are energy experiments for the wealthy developed world that are just too expensive for the requirements of the developing world. Safer, proliferation resistant, nuclear power without the long term high level waste storage problems is needed to power a growing world economy and to allow all nations to provide for and feed their growing populations in peace. These goals are available by changing the nuclear fuel cycle to a Uranium-233/Thorium fuel cycle.

Improved Thorium Nuclear Technology Solves the Nuclear Waste Storage Problem

The need to store spent nuclear fuel in a Yucca Mountain style long term repository for in excess of ~25,000 years  is one of the biggest problems preventing more wide spread acceptance of nuclear power. An improved nuclear technology, Thorium Fuel Cycle implemented in Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), dramatically reduces the need to store high level nuclear waste.

When it comes to Nuclear Waste, it is better to just make less of it.

Every year America's 104 Light Water Reactors generate another 2000 tons of high level nuclear waste all of which ultimately must be sent to repository storage. Yucca Mountain in the State of Nevada was for over 20 years the nation's designated long term nuclear repository. President Obama and Senate Leader Harry Reid have indicated that they are unsatisfied with use of Yucca Mountain for long term storage of nuclear waste and plan to slash funding for completion of the project. It will be very politically difficult to locate a new long term repository site anywhere in the US.

We should Transition to Nuclear Technology that makes less waste.

Uranium-Plutonium Fuel Cycle

America, at the height of the cold war with the former Soviet Union, selected Uranium-Plutonium nuclear fuel cycle to provide for the combined needs of weapons and power production. Our current approach to generating power from Uranium-Plutonium LWRs is called one pass through fuel utilization where the uranium nuclear fuel is loaded into solid fuel rods one time , the fuel rods produce heat in the reactor for typically 2 to 3 years, and then the fuel rods are removed from the reactor and put into long term storage in an underground geological repository.  

To generate 1 gigawatt of electricity for one year a current conventional one pass through Uranium-Plutonium Fueled Light Water Reactor would require approximately ~255 metric tons of uranium ore to be mined from the ground. Current American LWRs require fuel that is enriched in Uranium-235 so in the process of producing enriched fuel with the correct ratio of uranium isotopes the United States generates 220 metric tons of depleted uranium and 35 metric tons of enriched Uranium Fuel which ultimately is burned in reactor fuel rods and produces 35 metric tons of waste all of which would has to be placed in Yucca Mountain for in excess of 10,000 years. A conventional Uranium-Plutonium Fueled Light Water Reactor only burns about 2-3% maximum of its nuclear fuel (the typical value is closer to 1%).

Thorium Fuel Cycle

A  Thorium Fuel Cycle LFTR reactor would burn 1 metric ton of Thorium-232 to produce the same 1 gigawatt of electrical energy while producing 1 ton of fission products as waste. LFTR Thorium liquid fueled reactors are in excess of 98% fuel efficient and burn up almost all of its Thorium fuel to produce energy and fission products. The fission product waste produced by a LFTR reactor to produce the identical amount of electrical energy decays to safe levels in a much shorter amount of time than the 10,000 years required for the Minor Actinide waste from Uranium-Plutonium LWRs. Approximately 50% of the fission products produced by LFTR reactors decays to the benign levels of the natural background in 1 year. 83% of LFTR fission products would decay to the level of the natural background radiation in 10 years. All of the remaining fission products (17%) will decay to natural background radiation level within ~400 years. None of these fission products would have to be placed in a Yucca Mountain style geological repository but could be stored onsite near the LFTR reactor. A LFTR reactor started on its preferred start-up fuel, Uranium-233, would produce on the order of only 30 grams of Plutonium after burning 1 metric ton of Thorium fuel while producing 1 gigawatt of electicity for 1 year. This should be compared to approximately 300 kilograms of Plutonium produced by Uranium-Plutonium fuel cycle LWRs to generate the same amount of energy. It is significant that Thorium LFTRs produce so little Plutonium while generating energy because Plutonium is the most desirable material terrorists and rouge states would like to obtain to make nuclear weapons. It is very possible that this very small quantity of Plutonium produced in the operation of Thorium LFTR reactors might be yet further reduced by improvements in LFTR chemical processing and contaminant extraction technology. Someday, LFTRs may incorporate Laser isotope separation technology that would permit removal  of minor Actinide precursors like U-236 and Np-237 in near real-time as they are made in the reactor and thereby never produce any Plutonium-239 which is the primary worry from the standpoint of weapons diversion and nuclear proliferation.

If you choose a fuel cycle that does not make Plutonium in the first place you will not have to worry about Plutonium getting stolen or diverted to weapons applications somewhere down the line.

Thorium LFTRs produce less than one hundredth the amount of minor Actinide wastes that ultimately have to be put into long term storage at a geological repository. This is less than 1 part in 100 of the quantity of high level waste requiring long term sequestration relative to our current technology Uranium-Plutonium Fueled Light Water Reactors [1].  

If you use Thorium Fuel Cycle power and do not generate as much Plutonium and minor Actinide nuclear waste to start with you will not have build and fill Yucca Mountain style storage facilities at great cost leaving a long term environmental worry for hundreds of generations of Americans.

Thorium Fuel Cycle nuclear technology greatly reduces the long term high level nuclear waste problem. Reactors using current Uranium-Plutonium fuel cycle are safe, are largely already paid for, and produce huge amounts of non-GHG producing energy. Our current Uranium-Plutonium fuel cycle reactors are not optimized for minimization of long lived high level nuclear waste and produce relatively large amounts of Plutonium that can potentially be stolen and diverted to weapons production. Thorium Fuel Cycle is better technology that produces less waste and produces dramatically less plutonium (less than one ten thousandth the amount) and it deserves your investigation and support.

For a cost of approximately one tenth the projected 2010 budget of NASA per year for five years the US could have Oak Ridge National Laboratory and an industrial partner prepare plans for a commercial 1000 MW LFTR that would, in the future, greatly reduce the amount of toxic high level waste that would have to be placed in a Yucca Mountain style geological repository. Approximately 1.8 billion dollars a year for five years could fund a complete NRC certifiable approved reactor design that could be quickly adopted and built by utilities wanting to provide improved nuclear power. Ongoing design efforts at the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie in Grenoble, France and in Czechoslovakia and Japan are underway to produce new, updated, Thorium Molten Salt Reactor designs. It might be possible to bootstrap design efforts by joining with the French, Japanese, and Czechoslovakians on a combined, updated, NRC reviewable commercial LFTR reactor design and share the costs of development.

Sincerely, Robert Steinhaus - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Retired)

[1] Le Brun, C., "Impact of the MSBR concept technology on long lived radio toxicity and proliferation resistance", Technical Meeting on Fissile Material Management Strategies for Sustainable Nuclear Energy, Vienna 2005
http://hal.archives ouvertes.fr/docs/00/04/14/97/PDF/document_IAEA.pdf 

Note1: It is possible to use a fast neutron spectrum Fusion-Fission Reactors or alternately Fast neutron spectrum Molten Salt Reactors to burn all of the toxic high level contaminants produced by either LFTR Thorium Reactors or conventional Light Water Reactors. Such Reactors have been studied, designed, but have not yet built. The RRC-Kurchatov Institute in Russia and The Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie in Grenoble, France  have prepared designs studies for reactors that promise to produce a sufficiently hard neutron spectrum to permit rapid burning high level contaminants. In the case of the LFTR Reactor you only need to process one hundredth the amount of minor Actinide toxic waste and one part in 10,000 the amount of Pu-239 which is the material in spent nuclear fuel that is easiest to use for weapons production.

Note 2) A very nice Google Tech-Talk presentation on LFTR Thorium Reactor Technology delivered by Dr. Joe Bonometti  can be found at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8

another fine video that clearly presents the "big picture" in energy

Dr. Robert Hargraves, AB Mathematics Dartmouth College, PhD physics Brown University

Aim High -- Thorium Energy cheaper than from coal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgKfS74hVvQ

Note 3) Thorium Molten Salt Reactors are good science. Dr. Edward Teller, the founding director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote his final paper a month before his death on the subject of the advantages of Thorium Molten Salt Reactors.
http://www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/moir_teller.pdf