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Thorium - Uranium's Successor

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Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

Thorium has many uses.For many years it was used in gas light mantles,in the manufacture of glass for optical,camera and telescope lenses,as a catalyst in petroleum cracking and as an alloying element with magnesium for high temp strength. It has been used in radiation shields and can be used as a nuclear fuel. It is more abundant than uranium and in Australia is one of the minerals found in monasite which is part of the mineral sands found on our beaches. After the war in the 40s & 50s the commonwealth government took posession of the monazite. I was working in a sand mining company laboratory at the time and we established a pilot plant to extract the thorium.
We had to account for the monazite used. The monazite at that stage was taken away in army trucks. Thats news from a long time ago, I'm not up to date but I'm interested in the possibilities.
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

very interesting topic, keeping my ear to the ground on this one, uranium is in the box seat as far as energy is concerned for the next 12 years.
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

Interestingly, when U238 undergoes alpha decay, it becomes thorium (234), as it ejects a Helium particle. So isn't thorium really just a poor mans version of uranium
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

markrmau said:
Fascinating posts smurf, but I don't understand. If thorium is so good, the electricity market would have picked it up and we would be building thorium plants.
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yup. hard to see thorium getting up till uranium runs out...

Its bit like the electric car...
Oil companies are sitting on a trillion barrels of oil...
There is no way they are going to let that go to waste just cause an electric car is invented...


There are plenty of things that are freely available and abundant, and the technology is there to harness it into electricity... (solar, wind, hot rocks, etc...)

But why let it out the bag when there is still money to be made from coal.... then natural gas... then uranium...!
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

I was reading an interesting article (don't get scared kennas - it was in a mag that leans left) that was talking up the use of thorium, as at the current rate of uranium useage we would have approx 53 years left of uranium before we suffer severe shortages.

Thorium is roughly 3 times as abundant so the problem is delayed.

The article also stated that 94% of current nuclear waste could be reprocessed back into fuels for reactors, and would be better termed as wasted.

Substituting current technologies for further procseeing & better useage of nuclear materials, and then including thorium as part of a solution, could offer a long term viable alternative to current fossil fuels - especially if reacters were also designed to store hydrogen as a by-product, allowing mining operations to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels as well.
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

Mofra said:
current rate of uranium useage we would have approx 53 years left of uranium before we suffer severe shortages.
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We're suffering severe shortages now and they are expected to stay that way for the nexy 5-10 years. How high can the price of uranium go. Ecconomics will decide this one. When uranium hits ultra high prices IMO the attention will seriously begin to turn to thorium.
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

53 years and nuclear supplies only one fifth of world electricity. So we could all go nuclear for 10 years...

Regarding the waste, I think it's higher than even 94% wasted to my understanding. If we're going to get serious about nuclear power then we're going to have to get serious about reprocessing. Problem is the plutonium that makes available...
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

Interesting thread, I have been reading about this recently.

A search in StockDoctor turns up two stocks with thorium interests, EBR and SFR.
EBR is interesting because its anomalies are near BHP's Olympic Dam mine.

This could be worth watching.

Boggo
 
thorium friendly uranium energy!

THORIUM and or thorium hybred
from the uranium family 3 times more abundant than uranium has been used in reactors with no core melt down producing very high fission heat (tomatoe glasshouses and domestic heating),can be located throughout industrial suburbs and in the event of an accident will defuse into the atmosphere with the radioactivity easily managable, can be processed as fuel and made almost impossible to convert to weaponsAn estimated 20 kilograms of thorium equalling 1,500 kolograms of coal in terms of energy producing no carbon emmissions and a small portable thorium reactor with 20 kilograms provides enough domestic power for a 100 persons for many years.

It is estimated 30% and 20% of the worlds deposits lay in aust and india respectively can be produced relatively unregulated commercially, at a fraction of the cost of uranium,similarly the reactors which is in the infant stage of development,hydrogen when compressed into a liquid fuel as substitute for lpg gas that some buses in wa have been running for a number of years and commercial hydrogen fuel pumps in melbourne can be produced with converted thorium or thorium hybred reactors.

Why then for peace of mine with all the televised public debates havent thorium been raised to take the issue of nuclear weapons out of the equation I am stunned last week mr Ziggy Switkowski with abc lateline buisness for the first time to listen to a well informative matter of thorium for future energy needs and India the leader in this technology a diplomatic Howard government working to maintain a relationship of exclusive technology funnelled back into australia.when the thorium fusion may be at a practical application by 2020 if for a start nuclear enrichment can be weaned with capital injected into new infrastructure.

Is it i that this has passed me bye, only learning recently or is the potential of thorium already well known by say, shareholders of aru and what ever other companies that produce thorium .? The writer holds no shares in or making a plug for aru matross
 
Re: Thorium. Uranium's Successor

Might be recent hype, or just that I had finished reading this thread and was searching other areas when I found an IPO soon to arrive for a company called Metminco that specifically mentions Thorium as part of it's rare earth elements that it is exploring for. Thought this might be relevant for this thread.
 
Thorium along with geothermal are the two great hopes for energy and, ultimately, the world in my opinion.

Looking at everything else:

Fossil fuels: 3 main types of which two are extremely limited in terms of known and probable resources whilst the other (coal) is heavily polluting.

Biofuels: Running out of wood was why we used coal in the first place. When you realise that a week's worth of food for a man is equivalent to just two litres of petrol, but that it takes the equivalent of 20 litres of petrol to produce, you realise that biofuels aren't the answer.

Hydro: It certainly works and it's the best thing anyone's come up with for handling rapid load variations etc. But there just isn't enough of it to rely on it for the majority of the energy supply other than in a few parts of the world. For the rest, it's peaking and backup.

Non-hydro renewables: They're all intermittent in nature and really only useful as a supplement to some other energy source in order to "stretch out" its availability. Useful to some extent but ridiculously uneconomic to rely completely on.

Uranium: It works but at the cost of the ever present dangers associated with it, the proliferation of plutonium availability, waste disposal and the high financial cost.

Which leaves geothermal and thorium as the great technological hopes for energy. And both seem, on paper at least, to be practical.
 
So why isn't thorium been looked at by governments as a viable alternative?

What are the downsides to it? Aside from the fact that there are no plants using it at the moment
 
No expert in the field...
I have shares in a REE company that apparrently has Thorium as well, but the company doesn't mention it.
When the MD was asked why, he stated that theres no market for it and that in any case France had massive stockpiles of the stuff
So I'm thinking that anyone out there whoes looking at this as a little money earner might want to look into these stockpiles
I'm guessing that they were tailings from uranium extraction?
 
prawn_86 said:
So why isn't thorium been looked at by governments as a viable alternative?

What are the downsides to it? Aside from the fact that there are no plants using it at the moment
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Apparently there was a point in time back in the late early 60's when a decision was made by the Americans to either go with Uranium or Thorium...Uranium won because Plutonium was a major by product, and they needed plutonium for the cold war (Nukes).

Downsides...ive been looking at this for months and i just cant find any other than the waste, probably the biggest downside would be political as Thorium along with Uranium power is not considered to be renewable therefore has been left out of all climate negotiations.

The looney green left simply bundle thorium in with uranium and call them both nasty dangerous nuclear fuels, and have successfully lobbied the UNIPCC -Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to have all nuclear fuels excluded form climate negotiations.

With all the other crap going on about climate the incredible potential of thorium has got lost in the noise, politically thorium has no friends the existing nuclear industry supports the status quo and doesn't want change, the alternative power supporters are in with the greens and don't consider thorium to be renewable (technically there right).

There is no thorium lobby...to get an idea of the current frustrations have a look at the Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/

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For the record the 2 biggest listed Thorium plays in Australia are ILU & RIO they have millions of tonnes of the stuff.
 
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