Adam Sobel Week 19 - Thorium and Nuclear Energy

    When most people hear about nuclear energy, their first thought is about events like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Chernobyl. However, nuclear energy can be much more beneficial if it is used in a safer context. It can produce large amounts of energy with very little waste and by-products if you know how to do it right. Uranium is part of the reason that so many believe that nuclear energy is bad, because it can be extremely unstable and difficult to use, but other elements like thorium can be used with many more safeguards in place and with more benefits.

    Thorium is atomic number 90 while uranium is 92, so they have many similar properties due to their proximity on the periodic table. However, there are also many differences that make thorium a much better choice for nuclear energy.

    Sometimes, while mining uranium, it can release deadly radon gas that can cause cancer and lead to serious health defects for the miners. To protect the workers, large and expensive fans need to be set up to ventilate the mining shaft and get rid of the deadly gas. This takes a lot of extra time and money. However, with thorium, it is much less reactive and is easy to mine out of the ground without it releasing any gas. This saves on both money and time. Additionally, there is a higher concentration of thorium in its ore that the concentration of uranium in its ore, which means you can get more Thorium for less money, time, and effort, and without the possibility of lethal radon gas killing your workers. Lastly, the Earth contains about 3 times as much thorium compared to uranium, so there is more of it to be used.

    Another key difference is that uranium is "fissile" whereas thorium is "fertile". Fissile means that this element can create energy through fission by itself, and fertile means that it needs a little boost to start making some energy through another element, such as plutonium. This might sound bad, but it is actually beneficial. If uranium were to get too out of control and produce too much energy, there isn't really a way to stop it from getting dangerous. If thorium were to get too out of control while in the energy production process, you could just remove the plutonium and it will stop producing energy, making it much safer to work with. A lot of power plants that use thorium have meltable quarks to empty the thorium away from the plutonium in case of an accident.

    Additionally, the output of thorium is much higher that that of uranium. CERN estimates that 1 ton of thorium is able to create as much energy as 100 tons of uranium, which is equal to 3.5 million tons of coal. Additionally, thorium is much more pure than uranium, so it produces about 100 times less nuclear waste which is better for the environment and means that less work needs to be done to properly dispose of the waste.

    Lastly, it is incredibly difficult to make a nuclear weapon from thorium since it is fertile. This means that it is a lot safer to make thorium power plants all over the world because we don't have to worry about terrorists extorting its power and making dangerous weapons. This can help create energy in places that need power and for much cheaper costs.

    How do you feel about nuclear energy? Do you think that we need it to support are future? Are you more comfortable with the idea of nuclear energy after learning about all of the benefits from thorium?