Can thorium solve the nuclear problem?

Everybody, Peter zeihan here coming to you with the most recent in our asked heater series. Today the question is about thorium power. Now, there’s uranium-based nuclear power, thorium is a potential substitute. It’s a different element, a different chemical process. And according to its promoters, thorium is better because it is more difficult to turn into nuclear weapons on the back end. So if you can remove a lot of the proliferation concerns of a uranium power cycle, then maybe we can get rid of some of the obstacles to adopting nuclear power on a broader scale. The short version is probably not. But to understand that you have to understand how uranium works. So
when you mine uranium, you get something that is basically or we’re a very small percentage of it is usable Uranium decays over time over decades, over centuries over millennia, and you only get a few tenths of a percent of it, that is actually the stuff that you need. So what you have to do is you have to mill it to get rid of all the stuff you don’t need at all.
And you’re left with raw uranium in a form that we call yellowcake, which is a powder. And then you complex that in a compound called uranium hexafluoride, which is solid at room temperature. So you then heat it up a lot, and throw it into a gas centrifuge, where you spin out the different isotopes. When nuclear material degrades, half life, all that good stuff, it comes up with different atomic weights. And by putting it into a gas chamber and centrifuging that down, you can increase the cut of the part that is actually fissile, that you can use to achieve an atomic reaction. And in the case of a civilian power system, you’re after something between three and a half and 5%. Roughly, everyone has their own preferred mix, but that’s usually the range. Now once you have that kind of enriched fuel, you then compound it into a structure like a fuel rod and then that goes into nuclear power reactor where it goes through fission, the fission generates heat, the heat dries turbans, the turbines generate the electricity, that’s so grossly oversimplify. That’s basically how it works. Okay. On the back side, when you have a spent fuel rod, what has happened is that the uranium that is the physical component has changed. And now its waste material is plutonium. And people can take the plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods, and make plutonium based nuclear weapons. Now, if you’re going to do something with thorium, the problem is, is that it doesn’t make it too much better, plutonium is still the byproduct. And while you don’t generate as much plutonium from the use of thorium in your nuclear reactor, as you do from uranium, you still get some. In addition, you need a different kind of reactor, the fuel rod fabrication system is different. The purification system is different. The nuclear power reactor different systems different. So in exchange for doing a completely new fuel cycle in a completely new power cycle, you’re only getting like a quarter less plutonium. Now yes, it’s in a slightly more complicated chemical mix does require a little bit different equipment a little bit more skill in order to extract a thorium base plutonium byproduct. But the people who are making nuclear weapons aren’t doing it for economic reasons. And if you have a standard one gigawatt uranium based nuclear power system, you’re going to generate enough waste plutonium every year to make about six to 12. Crude plutonium devices.
Do this with thorium, you might only have enough for four to 10. It’s a marginal difference, honestly. So it’s an interesting technology. And for countries like India who have a lot more thorium than they do uranium, it’s probably worth exploring just for power sake, but it’s not going to solve anything on a nonproliferation issue. Neither
is it a silver bullet that will solve the nuclear industry’s problems, the big issues you have with medical industry in addition to proliferation, or you’ve got the sprint waste, you have to do something with now, in a uranium based fuel cycle, you can recycle those rods, but doing so extracts the plutonium and so now you’ve got plutonium sitting around in probably civilians hands, which is one of the reasons why in the United States. We for the most part, don’t reprocess it,
during the Cold War kind of work, because the military could take that plutonium away. But now, the military has been slimming down its nuclear arsenal for decades. Demand just isn’t there. There is no other use for plutonium really, it simply is not in the volume that it produces the stuff
and so you’re left with a waste disposition issue. Now other countries have addressed this if that’s the right word, by having some sort of government facility where most of the stuff is goes and is interred or is mixed with glass or is buried or whatever. None of these things really