RE: Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't

Wed, 21 May 2014 09:14:18 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 1:13 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't

 

On 5/20/2014 11:45 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

 

 

2014-05-20 18:44 GMT+02:00 meekerdb <[email protected]>:

On 5/19/2014 11:48 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

These are valid criticisms that are very much not administrative nature but cut 
right to the core [pun intended] of a world in which a multitude of thorium 
U233 breeder reactors proliferate widely. There is a risk that this 
unintentionally leads to a proliferation of U233 (which can be relatively 
easily be chemically separated out from the thorium fluoride salt mix and 
purified into U233 metal)

 

U233 isn't likely to proliferate because it is always mixed with U232 (which it 
can produce by decay) and U232, through its decay chain, produces intense gamma 
radiation.  So it can only be handled and processed remotely.  Even suicide 
bombers wouldn't last long enough to transport it very far.  And the U232 makes 
it difficult to turn the U233 into a bomb because it's presence tends to make 
the bomb low yield.  When making a U233 bomb they try to refine out all the 
U232.

 

Thanks, but it's Chris which has written your quote... but what you say is what 
I remembered reading about U233 difficult extraction.


OOps. My apologies.  The U233 can be separated from the Th232 by chemical 
means, which is relatively easy.  But the U233 comes out contaminated by so 
much U232 that it won't make a bomb and refining the U233 is hard both because 
it's an isotope separation problem and also because the U232 is an intense 
gamma ray source.

Actually my worry about terrorists with nuclear material is that they would 
make a dirty bomb - which doesn't need any refinement or special equipment.  In 
fact they could make a dirty bomb from medical radiological materials.  
Mishandling those is the major cause of radiation induced accidental deaths - 
not power plants.

 

A dirty bomb is definitely more of a realizable weapon and concerns me as well. 
The auditing/accounting of and control over nuclear materials needs to remain 
very high – IMO. And so the idea of widely dispersed small scale nuclear power 
facilities (as is envisioned by some pro-nuclear folks) seems to me to be 
patently insane – from this perspective.

As for deaths attributable to nuclear power; it depends who you ask, and who’s 
mortuary statistics you trust. How many cancer deaths can be attributed to the 
long term effects of the Chernobyl disaster for example. This is a much debated 
subject and the numbers vary widely with numbers ranging from the 4000 deaths 
attributed to Chernobyl, by the WHO to much higher figures of 200,000 and more 
given by the Russian Academy of Sciences (with even higher figures from the 
Ukrainian and Belarussian scientific academies) 

Chris

 



Brent

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