Moving Forward
Building a clean energy future requires investment into technologies capable of delivering such ends. As circumstances stand today, only thorium and renewables, working together, are capable of meeting this challenge. Yet deploying thorium as a base load solution requires investment and additional research that necessitates an appropriate social focus.
Yet there are outside forces slowing down this process – some of which we have already familiarized ourselves with. Because of the social hesitancy around nuclear power, politicians are often less eager to embrace advances in the technology. It is, of course, politically safer to stage photo-ops in front of wind turbines and solar panels while quietly pivoting towards coal or natural gas for baseload power when the cameras are turned off. This is effectively what Germany has done.[170]
But that’s not good enough anymore. The future risks to humanity’s long-term resource supplies, the state of Earth’s warming climate, the state of future population growth, and the corresponding state of future ecological collapse rank among the most serious problems our species has ever faced. And in the short-term future we will be facing all of them, more or less simultaneously.
Depending on renewables alone will not generate the immense energy required to provide for our needs and long-term growth estimates. Depending on renewables alone will not bring about an abundance of raw, inexpensive energy required to synthetically produce resources to an effectively unlimited scale. Depending on renewables alone will not extend baseload energy redundancy and reliability to provide all this and more for the indefinite future. There must be a political and social inflection point to recognize this reality.
By themselves, neither renewables nor nuclear can meet this challenge. Proponents of both technologies must realize that meeting future energy and resource challenges will require a joint venture between both – at maximal investment and output – working together in synchronicity. Nothing short of that end will get us to where we need to be.[171]
When the political and social will becomes present – a likelier “when” than “if” due to the realities of future energy and resource needs[172] – politicians need to consider regulatory streamlining. As we reviewed earlier, new nuclear initiatives face challenges that are as much regulatory as they are technical,[173] and that’s a problem that needs to change.[174] Regulation is a necessary – yet significant – component of the cost of implementing atomic energy, and regulators need both the freedom and impetus to craft regulations for 2019-era technology.
From there, we can begin to delve into the engineering nuances required to develop modular thorium reactors that can be safely mass-produced to a single standard. The aerospace industry is a perfect model for this goal, as it has automated the fast-turnaround construction of highly-sophisticated systems with extremely tight tolerances and even lower margins for error. If Boeing can mass-manufacture a commercial jetliner in nine days under these requirements,[175] we can do the same for modular reactors. Even so, some of the open considerations involving these engineering nuances include:
Design and process optimization. Molten salt reactors may not be a new technology in concept, but they have neither the research behind them nor the operational hours of Pressurized Water Reactors fueled by uranium-235. This has left several outstanding technical challenges. Among them:
- Whether the reactor design should use a one or two-fluid exchanger, both of which present engineering tradeoffs.[176]
- How to minimize corrosion of the reactor moderator (which used to be graphite, but would now be replaced with molybdenum alloys that have far greater resistance to fluoride salts and damage from fast neutrons).[177]
- How to prevent salt freezing if the reactor heat gets too low.[178]
- How to remove excess beryllium from the fluid exchanger.[179]
- How to contain gamma emissions from the uranium-232 within the reactor.[180]
Meeting these challenges is absolutely feasible – as we’ve solved harder problems at larger scales – but they still must be addressed.
Reactor ignition. Currently, there isn’t a standardized method to turn a Molten Salt Reactor “critical” and keep it operating for sustained power. Thorium is an excellent fuel source within breeder reactors, but that reaction has to be started somehow.[181] New reactor designs (of any type) are frequently ignited by an array of neutron sources.[182] But some of the most portable include beryllium bombardment by americium,[183] which is safer and less expensive than either radium or plutonium that could also serve in this function.[184] Science and industry will need to determine if this method works for thorium, and, if not, to identify a method that minimizes safety risk and doesn’t come with strict security controls.
Extra proliferation prevention. We’ve touched on the difficulties inherent to using the thorium fuel cycle to make a nuclear weapon, but any standardized design brought to market should include internal mechanisms to make that even harder. Deliberate material contamination, integrated process software to verify the presence of automated control systems (hash comparison),[185] and “call home” features that remotely alert the manufacturer should unauthorized tampering occur are all available options that can perform this function. Any new nuclear standard must include the most effective anti-proliferation mechanisms as a function of domestic and international law.
Export designs, controls and marketing. Scarcity Zero and the technology it proposes seeks to create a new market for large-scale energy generation, one with nigh-limitless economic potential in developing and modernizing nations. How we market and sell such technologies, and what limitations and controls we place on them, are issues that must be negotiated between private industry, global regulators, and diplomatic and security services. Once such technologies reach greater degrees of maturity, haste becomes critical, as we never want to be playing catch up in a global market against foreign competitors who got the jump on American innovation.
It’s well within our capabilities to answer these questions and address these challenges, and do so in a way that revolutionizes our approach to the most powerful source of energy we have ever discovered. If we were to truly invest in Molten Salt Reactor and microreactor technologies, it would lay the foundation for a clean, sustainable, affordable, and rapidly-deployable means of baseload power generation nationwide. We could advance our world and support the American economy for generations in one stroke. And while this would present yet another tool, alongside renewables, to dramatically multiply our potential for energy generation, it also would serve a more direct and even more important function: excess energy for fresh water and hydrogen fuel.
