A new Nuclear Boom is about to Start

For decades, thanks to a number of high profile disasters such as Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island, the nuclear power sector was considered the black sheep in the alternative energy market.

Recently, however, the sector received the support of the Trump administration, which has sought a $ 1.5 billion bailout for the declining American uranium industry in order to stock up on sufficient federal supplies for national security. Still, nuclear power could soon get another shot in the arm that could significantly improve its reputation in the public eye: the substitution of dangerous uranium in nuclear reactors with thorium.

Thorium is now touted as the great green hope for clean energy generation that produces less waste and more energy than uranium. Thorium is melt-proof, has no weapon-grade by-products, and can even consume old stocks of plutonium. The United States Department of Energy (DOE), the Nuclear Engineering & Science Center at Texas A&M, and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have partnered with Chicago-based Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE) to develop a new thorium-based nuclear fuel which they named ANEEL.

ANEEL, short for Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life, is a proprietary combination of Thorium and High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) that solves some of the toughest problems in nuclear energy, including high costs and toxic waste should. ANEEL can be used in conventional boiling water and pressurized water reactors, but performs best when used in heavy water reactors. More importantly, ANEEL reactors can be deployed much faster than uranium reactors.

A key advantage of ANEEL over uranium is that ANEEL can achieve a much higher fuel burn rate of 55,000 MWd / T (megawatt-day per ton of fuel) compared to 7,000 MWd / T for natural uranium fuel used in pressurized water reactors. This allows the fuel to stay in the reactors for much longer, i.e. the intervals between shutdowns to replace fuel assemblies are much longer. For example, the Indian block Kaiga-1 and the Canadian PHWR block Darlington hold the world records for uninterrupted operation with 962 days and 963 days, respectively. The thorium-based fuel has other important advantages.

One of the biggest is that much higher fuel burn up reduces plutonium waste by more than 80%. Plutonium has a shorter half-life of about 24,000 years compared to the half-life of uranium-235 of just over 700 million years. Even in small doses, plutonium is highly toxic and leads to radiation sickness, cancer and often death. Additionally, thorium has a lower operating temperature and a higher melting point than natural uranium, which makes it inherently safer and more resistant to core meltdowns.

Thorium's renewable energy properties are also quite impressive. There is more than twice as much thorium in the earth's crust as uranium; in India thorium is four times more abundant than uranium. Like uranium, it can also be extracted from seawater, which makes it almost inexhaustible.