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Page added on December 16, 2011
Why safe nuclear will rely on rare earth minerals
As SmartPlanet has reported, one way to make nuclear power safer would be to replace uranium fuel with a different element, thorium.
For a quick review: Compared to uranium, thorium produces little dangerous, weapons-grade waste. And thorium’s waste survives for only a few hundred years, not the 10s of thousands or even millions of years for uranium. Thus, it dramatically reduces the weapons-proliferation threat associated with nuclear power as we know it.
So, you might wonder, “where can I get some?”
Glad you asked! The story of thorium is, compellingly, tied into another story of our times: Rare earth minerals.
Rare earths, we all know, are used across a swath of products key to daily living – wind turbines, iPods, cellphones, catalytic converters, fuel cells, flat panel TVs, rechargeable batteries, magnets, radar equipment, you name it. Despite their name, rare earth minerals are common. But mining them and extracting the useful stuff is tricky and potentially ecologically hazardous. Today, China rules the world in rare earths, in part because it historically has turned a blind eye to the environmental risks.
Fed up with Chinese control, many countries are ramping up their own rare earth mining operations. That’s good news for anyone looking for thorium, because guess where thorium resides?
Answer: It typically occurs in monazite, a mineral that contains 15 different rare earth elements. Companies that mine monazite for rare earths end up with thorium as a byproduct. At the moment this is a burden – there’s little they can do with the thorium, yet regulators force them to spend money to keep it safely tucked away because it’s radioactive, albeit low level radiation.
Thus, forward thinking companies are beginning to tie together commercial opportunities in rare earths and prospective thorium nuclear. I spoke with many of their CEOs for my recent report Emerging Nuclear Innovations – Picking global winners in a race to reinvent nuclear energy, published by Kachan & Co. To name a few, Cape Town-based Rare Earth Extraction Co. (RARECO) plans to open a South African monazite mine for thorium and rare earths in 2013. And Vancouver’s Thorium One is trying to arrange “off take” agreements with mining companies like Australia’s Lynas Corp., in which Thorium One would find a buyer for thorium byproduct.
In fact, plenty of mined thorium already exists. French chemicals company Rhodia is believed to be holding a substantial stockpile.
Like rare earth minerals, thorium is not rare. It exists in ample quantities on most continents. India possesses a particularly abundant supply.
Thorium does not always coincide with rare earths, but its common occurrence within rare earth-rich monazite will give that much more impetus to countries outside of China to gear up their own rare earth mining industry.
After all, does any country that’s charting out a safe, thorium nuclear future really want to rely on China for the fuel? Besides, China will probably have plenty of its own thorium reactors to feed, as it leads the world in developing unconventional nuclear.
5 Comments on "Why safe nuclear will rely on rare earth minerals"
BillT on Fri, 16th Dec 2011 10:12 am
I wonder how they will mine and process it after oil is gone? I doubt that it is any better than uranium reactors which are a net zero in energy gain over the life of the reactor. Nuclear is not an energy source. It is an energy transfer medium like hydrogen. And who is going to pay for these reactors? Certainly not the public as India is a poor country and will always be one. Even the US cannot afford to build new reactors now.
DC on Fri, 16th Dec 2011 11:56 am
Why would a website called ‘smart planet’ promote the idea of ‘safe’ nuclear energy? There is no such thing. Thorium will never become a reality not because its impossible, but b/c too much time and money and effort has been wasted on Uranium-fueled stations. No one has the money or expertise to spare to invent, build and deploy a completely new technology like thorium now. If we had done that right off, maybe, but we didnt and now its probably too late to do much about it. Besides, nuclears claims of safe, cheap and clean were known to be hollow even at the beginning of the nuclear age. Youd have to be a fool to think thorium somehow will be safe-clean and cheap. It wouldnt any of those things either.
Nano on Fri, 16th Dec 2011 7:49 pm
DC. I think you are totally wrong. Nuclear power has been, and will be for hundreds of thousands of years, the cheapest way to produce energy. It is only a matter of building the stations and protecting them from the attacks of mad politicians.
Note that a full sized, bare bones, operational nuclear power plant could be built for $100 to $500 per kW. But the risk aversion and political risk of any nuclear power plant is so large, that in some places the cost rises to $8500 per kW.
This is pure politics.
You’d have to be a fool to discount fission energy while ignorant of its potential, precisely when we are at the dawn of a new era, one of chronic fossil fuels deficit and rising average temperatures due to man-made global warming.
Kenz300 on Fri, 16th Dec 2011 8:48 pm
Nuclear energy is too costly and too dangerous. The disaster at Fukishima is still going on. Chernobyl is looking for a billion dollars to build a new containment structure 25 years after their disaster. The cost for the clean up and storage of waste will go on forever.
It Fukishima had been a solar power plant or wind energy plant all the evacuated people would be moving back home and the site would already be cleaned up.
Canon Bryan on Sun, 18th Dec 2011 12:09 am
Commenters regularly suggest that nuclear is not safe. It is simply not true. Chernobyl, TMI and Fukushima were all Generation I reactors. That’s 50-year-old technology that hasn’t been deployed in decades. The new reactors being built today are Generation III, and have no resemblance to their clunky progenitors — particularly in the way of passive safety.
And yes, thorium will happen, but it will happen with thorium-based fuel, which can be used in 80% of the world’s existing reactor fleet with only minor calibrations, rather than a new fleet of reactors of radically different design. That should take the safety of nuclear energy from trillions-to-one to about 1 googol-to-one.
The idea of nuclear being net zero is also not true, and an absurd idea. Each reactor, for a period of 60 years, is fuelled with atoms that are bombarded by slow neutrons, inducing fission, and made to release millions of times the energy input. If you think a nuclear plant is net zero, then you must also believe that a coal plant is a giant energy suck, and our whole planet should be a global tundra by now.