The State of Nuclear Medicine and Research

Aside from energy generation, another useful aspect of nuclear fission is its ability to produce isotopes for many medical and industrial uses. Reactors that are designed to create these isotopes are typically called research reactors as they do not have much in the way of power output compared to their cousins, the dedicated nuclear power plants. However, isotopes such as technetium-99, chromium-51, gallium-57, etc. must be produced in research reactors by radiating parent isotopes and many research reactors are also used for nuclear scientific testing.

Unfortunately, many research reactors are badly in need of an overhaul as the world demand for radiopharmaceuticals has increased over the years and the number of these specialized reactors still operating has dwindled as many of them are shutdown over hysteria or age. The few that are still operating are running at full tilt and the increased stress on their components is causing them to wear out even faster and many research reactors are badly in need of major repairs. However, to temporarily shut down a research reactor usually means that it is depriving people of valuable isotopes that are needed for many medical procedures and tests. The shortage of research reactors across the world also means that ones that are still operational have to balance their obligations between isotope production, and the queues of researchers that have lined up to use the reactor for experiments and have been waiting for several years to do so.

The Depleted Cranium blog has an excellent post on the status of this phenomenon and the history of how the world came to be in this mess. Research reactors have not been immune to the same idiocy and short-sightedness that has surrounded nuclear power generation and they have also suffered because of it. The construction of new nuclear research facilities should be a world top priority because both science and peoples lives are being endangered with the status of our current situation. I whole-heartedly recommend that my readers visit the post on Depleted Cranium as it really does show how dire the situation is.

Thorium Comic

This is interesting. The Energy From Thorium blog posted a webcomic regarding thorium energy. Take a look

South Korean Companies Win Nuclear Bid

South Korea won against Areva in a bid to build four light water reactors. This was a huge victory for the nation as it will bring it recognition in the UAE in addition to proving that it is major world leader in nuclear technology. The reasons cited for the bid being given to South Korea over the French based company of Areva is because Areva has fallen behind schedule and gone over budget in its project in Finland. South Korea also underbid Areva by a significant amount which also was a point in its favor.

For more details, take a look at the Nuke Notes post by Dan Yurman and the original article on the Wall Street Journal.

Odds and Ends

I have added the informative blog, BraveNewClimate to my blog roll as it has been recommended to posters on the Energy From Thorium forum. The blogger, Barry Brooks does an excellent job in reporting on developments in climate science as well as critically examining the potential feasibility of "green" energy sources such as "renewables". Take a look at his December 17th post on the potential of the LFTR in Australia.

In other news, Florida might be making the shift from coal power to nuclear energy as Seminole Electric canceled its latest plan for a coal power station. As Seminole Electric has also been considering nuclear power as one of its future energy options, this might be a point in favor of nuclear power. Florida is relatively poor in natural gas, and transporting natural gas over long distances is an expensive undertaking.

India: The Next Leader In Nuclear Technology?

India has been researching the use of nuclear technology at breakneck speed. India is relatively deficient in coal and it has a lot more thorium than uranium. Because of this, India is currently pushing the AEC reactor design, but it could just as easily develop the LFTR paradigm as well.

China is also planning a large build out for new reactors, but the Chinese are also pushing coal as well as there are quite a few large coal deposits in eastern China. The degree of innovation displayed by Indian nuclear researchers is impressive, as well as the fact that it could make India's economy a force to be reckoned with as cheap energy spurs technological development. In addition, India's nuclear program is not hampered with regulations against nuclear reprocessing like in the US. This puts America at a disadvantage once again as we risk being left behind in the dust in our failure to embrace clean nuclear energy.

Interestingly, when you look at many countries that have an abundance of coal such as the US, China, and Australia, they also have ample supplies of uranium and thorium. However, the availability of coal has lead to its promotion in the national policies of the energy agendas of these countries. This is in spite of the fact that coal causes massive amounts of pollution both from carbon dioxide and the contamination from heavy metals. Injuries and deaths from coal are also a common occurrence from everyday operation in the coal industry.

There really is no longer any reason for the continual use of coal as the baseload energy source of choice. We have had the technology to replace coal with nuclear power for decades, and new reactor designs such as the LFTR are even more impressive than traditional light water reactors. At this point, coal is the soot-covered chain that is holding us back from cheap, clean energy in the form of nuclear power.

Atomic Insights Stomps on Silliness

As Rod Adams on the Atomic Insights blog points out, existing nuclear power plants are extremely well run and highly efficient facilities. Their equipment and components are routinely checked and updated as they have to be in order to provide a steady output of power during their operation.

This is why when people like Christian Parenti portray nuclear power plants as being decrepit structures harking from the Cold War era, it is a grossly inaccurate portrayal. A nuclear power station is an extremely durable structure that is built to last. The containment dome is an extremely thick shell of reinforced concrete that can withstand that ravages of time, weather, and the occasional aircraft impact. The reactor itself is operated by highly trained and competent technicians who make sure that everything is operating smoothly. The strong culture of safety behind the nuclear industry speaks for itself, because the accident of Three Mile Island did not result in any deaths or injuries despite there being a core meltdown.

The fact of the matter is, that this sort of fear mongering about nuclear energy is never warranted, and causes people to panic needlessly. The paranoia of nuclear power is what is giving coal and natural gas their business as we see more fossil fuel burners being built to meet increasing energy demand. The nuclear genie is already out of the bottle, so we might as well put it to use.

Could This Be the Beginning of the Thorium Age?

Lots of exiting things have been happening on the horizon for the future of thorium-based energy, particularly in the form of the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) concept. I would like to draw your attention to a recent Tech Talk sponsored by Google. Kirk Sorensen, an expert on the LFTR as well as being a brilliant man gave an informative as well as enlightening speech on potential of the LFTR in regards to the future of energy. It is quite a long video, but I strongly recommend that those of you who are interested in the future of clean energy watch it in its entirety. Not only can the LFTR provide a cheap source of plentiful, environmentally friendly electricity, the waste heat from an LFTR can be used for many applications ranging from an economic means of desalinization to the production of synthetic fertilizers and fuels with no need to use petroleum or natural gas. Hydrogen can be thermochemically produced from water at the operating temperature of an LFTR, and carbon can be extracted from the atmosphere. By doing this, you can synthetically produce alkanes that form the basis of organic chemistry such as the production of polymers and the refining process of petroleum into liquid fuels. By doing this, you could produce synthetic fuels like dimethyl ether or methanol and they would be carbon neutral when burned since the carbon used for their production was originally extracted from the atmosphere.



Next, there have been a whole series of LFTR-related recent posts over at the fascinating blog, The Nuclear Green Revolution run by Charles Barton, a man whom I admire. His father was a researcher over at the Oak Ridge project during the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) experiments of the 1960's before the MSR project was de-funded for political reasons. He offers a personal insight into both the convoluted history behind MSR-type reactors as well as the political issues that caused the project to be canceled in the first place. Mr. Barton has a series of essays looking at the economic means of lowering the costs of construction and operation of nuclear reactors as well as promoting new nuclear research.

Preface

1. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Economies of Scale or Serial Production?
2. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Advanced Materials
3. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Inherent Safety
4. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Nuclear Waste
5. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Labor Costs
5a. Addendum: Estimated US Energy Use in 2008: ~99.2 Quads
6. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Some Siting Considerations
7. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Investment Costs
8. The Keys to Lowering Reactor Costs: Research and Development

Confessions of a Nuclear Blogger, Part I

Finally, we have a post by davidwalters over at the Daily Kos comparing the economics of scaling behind the different potential sizes of the LFTR. He also has an interesting analysis of a means of their deployment as well as their potential to be used for naval transportation. An LFTR-powered cargo ship would be orders of magnitudes cleaner than ones that use conventional sources of energy, such as marine diesel which is one of the dirtiest grades of liquid fuel in existence.

My Long Silence is Over

I apologize to my readers for the prolonged absence of new posts. I have been extremely busy this semester and have also had some serious issues with my right eye developing endophthalmitis. It resulted after a minor injury involving a two millimeter long shard of corningware becoming lodged in my right eye after an old pot I was boiling ramen noodles in exploded on my stove. Corningware, because of its partially recrystallized structure, tends to shatter with explosive force rather than merely break when it fails.

I had gotten somebody to drive me to the emergency room where the shard of corningware was removed from the right side of my right eye where it had narrowly missed my lens and cornea. However, a few days later my eye had become infected by bacteria that had probably been introduced into the interior of the eye when it had been punctured. I had been taking some perscribed tobramycin eyedrops as a preventative measure until my eye healed but the strain of bacteria that infected my eye was apparently resistant to it. I went to a clinic where I had to have an antibiotic called polymixin B injected directly into the interior of my eye and had to apply polymixin B eyedrops to the eye three times a day in addition to taking an antibiotic called Zyvox orally. Towards the beginning of the infection, I felt miserable and my eye looked very ghastly indeed. At one point the physician that I was speaking to at the clinic said that if the treatment with the polymixin B and the Zyvox was unsuccessful, I would seriously have to consider enucleation (eye removal) to control the infection.

Thankfully, the treatment worked and my vision in the eye has returned to normal with no apparent permanent loss of vision. I am fortunate that I did not suffer any permanent injury to the eye as I was not sure how I would handle having monocular vision. Everyday activities such as driving a car, reading, or even drawing and painting for my studio art classes became a major challenge as I did not have any depth perception while wearing a patch over my right eye. It was only for four weeks yet I could barely stand it. I do not know how people who have only one functional eye can manage their disability for the long term.

Despite my apparent abandonment of my blog, I have done my best to keep up with the news regarding my fellow nuclear bloggers as well as reading the recent posts on my blog roll. I could not attend the last two AREVA conference calls as I have been extremely busy but I am sure that Dan Yurman over at the Nuke Notes blog can fill me in on the details. I will have more time during the summer so I hope to put up at least two posts per week again.

Here Is Your Chance to Be a Nuclear Technician!

The NEI blog posted something interesting today. Over at NEI they found a nuclear power plant simulator. It is an interesting little flash game that lets you set the control rod and coolant levels as you try to produce as much power as possible without causing a nuclear meltdown. You have two settings to choose from. "Normal" simulates a normal reactor, while "Difficult" simulates a reactor that has fallen behind on maintenance.

The demo version of game itself can be played at AE4RV by following this link. You can also play the full version of the game by downloading it. Consider this a small little indulgence at work or at school when you should be doing other things.

History of the Oak Ridge Project

If I may direct your attention to the excellent blog, Energy From Thorium run by a man who's father used to be a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). ORNL was a government project that was setup during the mid 1960's to test the viability of a molten salt reactor. A molten salt reactor is unlike a light water reactor in that it does not use solid fuel pellets of enriched uranium. Instead, the radioactive isotopes are chemically bonded with a halogen such as chlorine or flourine to form a liquid mineral salt that recirculates around the reactor chamber during the reaction.

A molten salt reactor has several advantages over the traditional light water reactor design. First and foremost, it is physically impossible for a molten salt reactor to experience a meltdown since the nuclear fuel is already in a molten state as the reactor operates at a much higher temperature than a light water reactor. There is a cooled plug of sodium at the bottom of the reactor chamber that would heat up and melt during abnormally high temperatures. This would cause the reactor core to drain out into an underground container where it can cool and be safely disposed of during an emergency. Secondly, the actinides that result as a byproduct of nuclear fission would never leave the reactor chamber so there would be little, if any leftover material to be disposed of. As a third advantage, it has a much higher fuel efficiency to energy production ratio than a light water reactor for the same amount of fuel consumed. There is also the fact that molten salt reactors are quite flexible in the isotopes that they can use for energy.

As a variant of the MSR design, the MSR can operate on a closed nuclear fuel cycle between thorium and U233. This produces 10% more fuel than it consumes each year which can eventually be collected to start a new MSR. Finally, the use of flourine instead of chlorine for the fused salt mixture would be advantageous because of the ease of isotopic seperation. In short, this variant of the MSR design is known as a liquid flouride thorium reactor (LFTR).

There is an intriguing article about the history of the Oak Ridge project on the Energy From Thorium blog I mentioned earlier and how it was single handily ruined by one man named Milton Shaw. Because of this, the LFTR project has been dead and buried since the early 1970's. There were managerial issues that resulted from Shaw's mismanagement of the Oak Ridge staff and the bitterness that resulted.

Also, due to the political climate in the US which is deeply paranoid about all things with the word "nuclear" in the title, the LFTR has little hope of ever being built in America. However, all is not lost as France, Japan, India, and Russia are all evaluating the LFTR concept which will probably enter the construction phase very soon in these countries. The US will probably continue to waste time and money on "renewables" and "clean coal" for its energy supply in the foreseeable future, leading to rolling blackouts being the norm for much of the country at peak demand.

Atheist Blogroll

N^4 has been added to the atheist blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, please visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.