Thorium
a slightly different way to make nuclear waste and weapons
Nearly all reactors have used uranium-235, element number 92 on the periodic table, as the fuel. With nuclear power having unpleasant public associations, the nuclear industry has been trying to persuade that using radioactive thorium (element number 90) would be a better source for using atomic fission to boil water for electricity.
Thorium cannot fuel reactors. Thorium needs to be converted into fissionable isotope uranium-233 in a reactor.
The thorium fuel cycle is at least as dangerous as the U-235 cycle. All reactors make nuclear waste that cannot be detoxified. Thorium by itself is radioactive and chemically toxic. It is best left safely locked up in the crust of the Earth, out of the biosphere.
Thorium can also be used to make atomic bombs that do not require "implosion" to trigger. Widespread use of thorium originated reactors fueled by u-233 could accelerate nuclear proliferation faster than existing U-235 technology.
Here are a few links that debunk pro-thorium propaganda that pretends it could be a positive substitute to existing nuclear power reactors.
KILLING OUR OWN:
The Disaster of America's Experience
with Atomic Radiation
Harvey Wasserman & Norman Solomon
with Robert Alvarez & Eleanor Walters
A Delta Book
1982
https://ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO9.html
Thorium 230, for example, has a half-life of eighty thousand years and is believed by some to be as toxic as plutonium. A silver-white metal, thorium tends to deposit in the liver, bone marrow, and lymphatic tissue, where even minute quantities can cause cancer and leukemia. If inhaled as dust it can cause lung cancer. According to a study by Winterer, under some circumstances thorium can become "trapped" in the body, making it "a permanent source of radiation" there, and thus doing untold damage to the human organism.[18]
IEER/PSR factsheet: Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power.
http://ieer.org/resource/factsheets/thorium-fuel-panacea-nuclear-power/
http://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/thorium2009factsheet.pdf
The fission of thorium creates long-lived fission products like technetium-99 (half-life over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository.
If the spent fuel is not reprocessed, thorium-232 is very-long lived (half-life:14 billion years) and its decay products will build up over time in the spent fuel. This will make the spent fuel quite radiotoxic, in addition to all the fission products in it. It should also be noted that inhalation of a unit of radioactivity of thorium-232 or thorium-228 (which is also present as a decay product of thorium-232) produces a far higher dose, especially to certain organs, than the inhalation of uranium containing the same amount of radioactivity.
Thorium Reactors/ Back to the Dream Factory
by Gordon Edwards, July 13, 2011
www.ccnr.org/Thorium_Reactors.html
Every time a nuclear power reactor idea doesn't work out, and ordinary people get down-hearted and start to doubt the magnificence and benificence of nuclear energy, nuclear proponents rush back to their well-stocked dream factory to fetch another idea -- one that is sufficiently unfamiliar and sufficiently untested that ordinary people have no idea whether it is good or bad, safe or dangerous, feasible or foolish, or whether the almost miraculous claims made about it are true or false. ....
nuclear proponents ... are now promoting small reactors which can be mass-produced by the thousands and sprinkled on the landscape like cinnamon on toast. Pebble-bed reactors, molten-salt reactors, thorium reactors, have been paraded before the public with as many bells and whistles as the nuclear industry can muster, to distract people's gaze away from the construction fiascos, the litany of broken promises from the past, the still-unsolved problems of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons proliferation, and the horror that is Fukushima. ....
uranium-238 and thorium-232 are "fertile" materials, which means that IF they are placed in the core of a nuclear reactor (one that is of necessity fuelled by some other material -- a fissile material), some fraction of those fertile atoms will be transmuted into man-made fissile atoms.
Inside a nuclear reactor, some uranium-238 atoms will get transmuted into plutonium-239 atoms, and some thorium-232 atoms will get transmuted into uranium-233 atoms.
Both plutonium-239 and uranium-233 are fissile materials which are not naturally-occurring. They are both usable as either fuel for nuclear reactors or as nuclear explosive materials for bombs.
In "Operation Teapot", the USA exploded an atomic bomb made from uranium-233 in 1955. ...
In general, to obtain quantities of plutonium-239 or uranium-233, it has been necessary to "reprocess" the irradiated material that started out as uranium-238 or thorium-232. This means dissolving that irradiated material in acid and then chemically separating out the fissile plutonium-239 or uranium-233, leaving behind the liquid radioactive wastes which include dozens of fission products (broken pieces of split atoms, including such things as iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90, etc.) and other radioactive waste materials called "activation products" and "transuranic elements".
Reprocessing is the dirtiest process in the entire nuclear fuel chain, because of the gaseous radioactive releases, liquid radioactive discharges, and large quantities of highly dangerous and easily dispersible radioactive liquids. Reprocessing also poses great proliferation risks because it produces man-made fissile materials which can be incorporated into nuclear weapons of various kinds by anyone who acquires the separated fissile material.
....
Thorium reactors still produce high-level radioactive waste. They still pose problems and opportunities for the proliferation of nuclear weapons. They still present opportunities for catastrophic accident scenarios -- as potential targets of terrorist or military attack, for example.
Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't
Robert Alvarez, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 11, 2014
www.energyskeptic.com/2014/thorium-wonder-fuel-that-wasnt/
... a radioactive element that is far more abundant than uranium. Thorium promoters consistently extol its supposed advantages over uranium. News outlets periodically foresee the possibility of "a cheaper, more efficient, and safer form of nuclear power that produces less nuclear waste than today's uranium-based technology."
The United States has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for some 50 years and is still struggling to deal with the legacy of those attempts.
In addition to the billions of dollars fruitlessly spent to develop thorium fuels, the US government will have to spend billions more, at numerous federal nuclear sites, to deal with the wastes produced by those efforts.
And America's energy-from-thorium quest now faces an ignominious conclusion: The US Energy Department appears to have lost track of 96 kilograms of uranium 233, a fissile material made from thorium that can be fashioned into a bomb, and is battling the state of Nevada over the proposed dumping of nearly a ton of left-over fissile materials in a government landfill, in apparent violation of international standards.
For a terrorist, however, uranium 233 is a tempting theft target; it does not require advanced shaping and implosion technology to be fashioned into a workable nuclear device. The Energy Department recognizes this characteristic and requires any amount of more than two kilograms of uranium 233 to be maintained under its most stringent safeguards, to prevent "onsite assembly of an improvised nuclear device." As for the claim that radiation levels from uranium 232 make uranium 233 proliferation resistant, Oak Ridge researchers note that "if a diverter was motivated by foreign nationalistic purposes, personnel exposure would be of no concern since exposure … would not result in immediate death." ....
By the late 1980's, after several failed attempts to use it commercially, the US nuclear power industry also walked away from thorium. The first commercial nuclear plant to use thorium was Indian Point Unit I, a pressurized water reactor near New York City that began operation in 1962. Attempts to recover uranium 233 from its irradiated thorium fuel were described, however, as a "financial disaster." The last serious attempt to use thorium in a commercial reactor was at the Fort St. Vrain plant in Colorado, which closed in 1989 after 10 years and hundreds of equipment failures, leaks, and fuel failures. There were four failed commercial thorium ventures; prior agreement makes the US government responsible for their wastes. ....
Uranium 233 compares favorably to plutonium in terms of weaponization; a critical mass of that isotope of uranium—about 6 kilograms, in its metal form—is about the same weight as a plutonium critical mass. Unlike plutonium, however, uranium 233 does not need implosion engineering to be used in a bomb. In fact, the US government produced uranium 233 in small quantities for weapons, and weapons designers conducted several nuclear weapons tests between 1955 and 1968 using uranium 233. Interest was renewed in the mid-1960s, but uranium 233 never gained wide use as a weapons material in the US military because of its high cost, associated with the radiation protection required to protect personnel from uranium 232, a highly radioactive contaminant co-produced with uranium 233.
www.energyskeptic.com/2014/thorium-in-the-news/
Rees, I. June 2011. Don't believe the spin on thorium being a greener nuclear option. The Guardian