The History of Nuclear Energy (Both Uranium- and Thorium-Fueled)
To truly solve energy transition, we need to figure out how to make safe, clean nuclear energy cost less than energy from fossil fuels costs today.
Dear Readers,
This a guest post by Erik Townsend (@ErikSTownsend), publisher of Energy Transition Crisis docuseries and MacroVoices podcast host. It is a write up of what he talked about in the X Space that we had last sundy and we listed the link with the outline in a previous post here: The Future of Nuclear Energy, the Role of the Arab World, and Impact on Uranium/Thorium Markets
The History of Nuclear Energy (Both Uranium- and Thorium-Fueled)
By Erik Townsend
Not all nuclear reactors are created equal! In the West, we’re still building reactors based on outdated technology that’s not ideally suited to solving Energy Transition. But China has recently made terrific strides in adopting much better, safer, advanced reactor designs. China is in the lead on nuclear, by a lot! And in my opinion, the bureaucracy of Western governments is preventing the West from competing as it should with China.
This is a big deal, because unless we change our ways and catch up with the latest reactor technology, China will control energy for the next 100 years. The really crazy part is that it’s not the case that China has gone and invented better reactors than we have in the West. To the contrary, what China has done was simply to recognize that the best nuclear reactor designs developed in the United States were never commercialized in the West due to government malfeasance.
All China had to do was pick up reactor designs abandoned by the West in the 1960s, and start building them. And they’re having great success using the technology my parents’ tax dollars paid for, and which we should have standardized our own civilian power generation on half a century ago. Meanwhile, in the West, we continue to build nuclear reactors based on older, less reliable, and more dangerous technology than we should. While the U.S. Military clearly leads the world in the sophistication of its nuclear weapon systems, the U.S. Government has failed badly in terms of choosing the best nuclear technologies for commercialization in civilian power generation.
The reactor designs China is building right now were developed at U.S. Taxpayer expense in the 1960s, and could have completely prevented the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima accidents, had we standardized civilian nuclear energy on those superior designs back in the early 1970s. But instead, we abandoned the superior designs and standardized instead on early-1950s reactor designs collectively known as light water reactors. In this author’s opinion, this was one of the worst policy blunders in our government’s history.
To understand this bizarre situation as it stands today requires first understanding the history of how the industry got to where it is. This substack post is an expanded, more detailed version of a brief history of nuclear energy that I gave in an X Spaces interview with Dr. Anas Alhajji on February 18, 2024, and will contain more detail than I had time to cover in the ‘Spaces. If you prefer to listen to a shorter audio version of this post, the X Spaces interview can be found here.
It All Started With the Bomb…
All the most important nuclear research occurred during the Manhattan Project. The goal of the U.S. military was to get the nuclear bomb before the Nazis did, in order to win World War II. Period, end of story; that’s all they cared about. Civilian nuclear energy was never a goal.
To understand the evolution of nuclear energy, it’s essential to first understand that developing it was never a priority of the government. The opportunity to harness nuclear fission for civilian power generation was obvious to the scientists and engineers working on the bomb, and many of them spoke up to suggest a civilian nuclear energy program was warranted. At first, the government completely ignored this opportunity.
The only reason civilian nuclear energy was ever developed was that nuclear power (as opposed to nuclear weapons) was researched and developed specifically for propulsion of military nuclear submarines. And once power reactors had been developed for submarine propulsion, essentially all the engineering work had already been done. Hooking one of those submarine propulsion reactors up to a steam turbine to produce electricity on dry land was such a painfully obvious opportunity that even the government finally recognized it.
Even after civilian nuclear energy became a policy initiative, the priority (and amount of research funding) it received paled in contrast to the weapons program where all the most important research on nuclear fission occurred. Very little thought and almost no formal research work went into considering whether the reactor design chosen for submarines was the best one for civilian power generation. They just used what they already had because it had been shown to work.
Sourcing Fissile Material
Heavy elements are said to be fissile if they can sustain a nuclear chain reaction when bombarded with low-energy neutrons. Put another way, fissile material is the stuff you need to make either a bomb or a nuclear reactor work. In theory there are lots of fissile isotopes of the heavy elements, but only one of them, Uranium-235, occurs in nature in sufficient quantities that it can be mined and refined into fissile material that could be used to make a bomb or to fuel a nuclear power plant.
Only 0.7% of natural uranium mined out of the ground is Uranium-235. The rest is Uranium-238, which is not fissile and therefore can’t be used as nuclear reactor fuel. Back in the 1940s, they weren’t sure how much uranium could be mined from the ground, and they knew that less than 1% of it was the fissile kind of uranium that would be of any use for either bomb-making or civilian nuclear power. What’s worse, the only process known at the time to enrich natural uranium (meaning increase the percentage of Uranium-235 and decrease the percentage of Uranium-238) was called gaseous diffusion, and it was both incredibly expensive and time consuming. And they knew they needed at least 90% U-235 to make a bomb work, so there was a lot of enriching to be done!
A massive secret project was commissioned in Oak Ridge, TN to enrich as much natural uranium as possible into “weapons grade” uranium, which is defined as 90% or higher Uranium-235 content. Hundreds of workers operating the machinery used to do this job literally had no idea what the purpose or function of the equipment they were operating was. It was all top-secret, and only a handful of people even knew the purpose of this massive project in Oak Ridge. It took years to enrich enough Uranium-235 to make the Hiroshima bomb.
Given the challenges of sourcing enough Uranium-235 to make a bomb, the Manhattan Project put very high priority on figuring out where they could possibly find some alternative to Uranium-235. The scientists were able to conceive an ingenious process that uses a nuclear fission chain reaction to convert one chemical element into another element. This brilliant innovation made it possible for the researchers to include two more radioisotopes, Uranium-233 and Plutonium-239, in their list of possible bomb-making ingredients.
There is no natural source for more than trace quantities of either of those radioisotopes. The only way for humans to obtain them is to first be in possession of some Uranium-235, and then use that Uranium-235 to fuel a nuclear fission chain reaction that will produce either Uranium-233 or Plutonium-239 as a by-product of that fission chain reaction.
If you asked most people today to define a “nuclear reactor”, they would probably tell you it’s an invention for making electricity from nuclear energy. But that was not the original purpose of nuclear reactors, which were originally known as chain-reactors. The purpose for which they were first invented was not to make energy, but rather to manufacture fissile radioisotopes that don’t occur in nature in sufficient quantity to be able to make bombs from them.
Making Plutonium-239 was relatively straightforward. The process is known as breeding. A specially designed breeder reactor fueled by enriched uranium relied on the Uranium-235 contained in that enriched uranium to sustain the nuclear fission chain reaction occurring inside the reactor core. That same chain reaction also supplied an abundance of neutrons being released by the fissioning Uranium-235. Some of those neutrons were absorbed by the Uranium-238 which was not fissile by itself. But absorbing those neutrons transformed the Uranium-238 into various fissile isotopes of Plutonium. Effectively, the function of the breeder reactor was to transform Uranium-238 previously thought to be useless into fissile Plutonium-239, which was even better suited to bomb making than Uranium-235.
Another big top-secret project was undertaken in Hanford, WA to manufacture Plutonium-239 using an experimental breeder reactor. The idea was to have a backup source of fissile material in case the project in Oak Ridge failed to produce enough Uranium-235 to make a bomb. In the end, both projects were successful. The Hiroshima bomb was made from Uranium-235 enriched in Oak Ridge, and the Nagasaki bomb was made from Plutonium-239 manufactured by the breeder reactor in Hanford.
The remaining candidate was Uranium-233, another isotope of Uranium which could theoretically be used to make a bomb. Uranium-233 doesn’t occur in nature, but it can be bred from another element called Thorium-232 using a special kind of breeder reactor.
But the research scientists quickly realized that it would be much more difficult and expensive to make a bomb from relatively unstable Uranium-233 than from Plutonium-239 or Uranium-235. So the Manhattan project summarily rejected Uranium-233 and the Thorium used to produce it from consideration, and focused solely on the other two isotopes which were far more suitable for bomb-making. I’ll explain what all this has to do with civilian nuclear energy today later in this post.
From Nuclear Bombs to Nuclear Power
Once WWII was over and the Cold War was beginning, the military suddenly discovered its own need for nuclear power in addition to nuclear weapons. Admiral Hyman Rickover made the argument for a nuclear-powered submarine that could stay submerged almost indefinitely, and which could eventually be armed with submarine-launched nuclear missiles that could never be disabled by an enemy first-strike.
In pursuit of nuclear submarine propulsion, generation of electricity from a nuclear reactor was first demonstrated in a U.S. Government research laboratory in 1951. The Nautilus nuclear submarine entered service just four years later in 1955. It used a brand-new reactor design called the Pressurized Light Water Reactor (PLWR). That reactor was designed by Alvin Weinberg, who would later emphasize in his 1997 auto-biography that the PLWR was chosen solely because it was most suitable to fit into the cramped space available inside the hull of a submarine. I’ll come back to the relevance of that point later in this post.
When civilian nuclear energy was later contemplated, a decision was made to base all civilian nuclear electric generation on the same Light Water Reactor (LWR) design that had already been proven to work for submarine propulsion. Now this next point is really important to understand: That decision was made by bureaucrats, not by scientists and engineers. And the logic behind the decision was simply that the LWR was already proven to work in submarines, so they thought it made sense to just use what’s known to work rather than spend a lot of time and money considering other designs. Contrary to popular misconception that exists to this day within the nuclear power industry, the choice of the LWR design for civilian nuclear power was definitely not made after any sort of competition between reactor designs based on merit, as evaluated by scientists and engineers. Weinberg was emphatic on that point in his book.
By 1958, just 7 years after the first laboratory demonstration of electricity from nuclear power, they had plenty of experience operating LWRs, and had already figured out that the worst safety risks were fuel rod melt-downs and hydrogen explosions, like the ones that blew the roofs off the reactor buildings in Fukushima 53 years later.
They knew way back in 1958 that the whole problem causing these safety risks was the choice of water as the reactor core coolant. So the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was commissioned in 1958 to explore a better reactor design that would overcome the inherent safety problems associated with water-cooled reactors. Alvin Weinberg, the inventor of the PLWR, was by then director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the entire Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was under Weinberg’s leadership.
To put this in perspective, more than 20 years before the Three Mile Island accident, Weinberg’s team predicted that fuel rod melt-downs and hydrogen explosions were going to be a major risk for civilian nuclear power, so they set out to solve that problem before the first accident had a chance to happen. They succeeded in solving those problems by the late 1960s, but sadly those solutions were never commercialized and put to use before the accidents occurred.
The first Molten Salt reactor was built in 1964 at ORNL, and it completely eliminated the risks of fuel rod meltdowns and hydrogen explosions. And it was fueled by Thorium rather than Uranium-235. Now this point is super important: Stepping back to the big picture, Nuclear Energy would eventually face massive public opposition due to the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation. Everyone was afraid nuclear powerplants would somehow be misused to make more weapons-grade fissile materials for bomb making. In reality, that risk was far lower than perceived, because non-breeding civilian power reactors don’t produce a useful quantity of plutonium. But perception was winning out over reality, and the public’s fears were being fueled by anti-nuclear activists secretly funded by Big Oil to take down the formative nuclear power industry.
Remember how I explained earlier that the Manhattan Project had summarily dismissed Uranium-233 and Thorium-232 as a complete waste of time, because even the Manhattan Project scientists thought that building a bomb from U-233 would be difficult to the point of being impractical? What could possibly be better for civilian power generation than a reactor design based on a nuclear fuel that had been rejected by the Manhattan Project precisely because they thought making a bomb from it would be so difficult as to be impractical, even for them?
The experimental Molten Salt reactor was fueled with Thorium rather than uranium precisely because Alvin Weinberg saw the weapons proliferation debate coming, and recognized the need for civilian power reactors that couldn’t possibly be re-purposed for bomb-making. It’s truly remarkable that Weinberg and his team in Oak Ridge were so prescient way back in 1964.
Source: Egeneration. org.
The Thorium Breeder Reactor: A Forgotten Invention
Thorium fueled reactors were never commercialized until very recently, when China began building them using the Oak Ridge research my parents’ tax dollars paid for in the 1960s. In 2018 China began building its first Thorium fueled MSR in the Gobi Desert. In December 2023, China announced it would build container ships powered by Thorium-fueled MSRs, marking the first long-overdue commercialization of this advanced reactor design.
Why hasn’t this far-superior design been commercialized in the West? Because the bureaucrats in charge of the U.S. nuclear program knew that the esteemed Manhattan project had already made the determination that Thorium and Uranium-233 were a “dead end”, and a decision had already been made to standardize on the LWR designs for civilian nuclear power. But wait, that doesn’t make any sense!!! Thorium and Uranium-233 are a dead end if your goal is to make a bomb. But if your goal is to prevent anyone from repurposing a civilian power reactor to try and make a bomb, then Thorium and Uranium-233 are an ideal choice precisely because they’re so poorly suited to bomb-making!
Weinberg and his team at Oak Ridge understood all this way back in the early 1960s! Yet molten salt reactors were never commercialized in the West, and Weinberg would later exclaim in his 1997 auto-biography that he thought abandoning molten salt and Thorium was one of the greatest tragedies of the first nuclear era. So far as I can tell, to this day, the problem is simply that the bureaucrats in charge are still stuck on the simplistic strategy of standardizing all civilian nuclear power on LWRs because they were proven to work in submarines, so surely they must be good enough for civilian power. When challenged as to why they never adopted Thorium, they resort to the excuse that the esteemed Manhattan project already determined that Thorium and Uranium-233 were a dead end and a waste of time. They’re obviously missing the point rather badly.
Nuclear Energy Today: Are we ready for Energy Transition?
Clearly, to solve Energy Transition, we should be looking at the very best reactor designs available, just as China is already doing with great success. And the crazy thing is, in China’s search for the very best 21st century reactor design, they chose Weinberg’s Thorium Molten Salt breeder reactor from the 1960s! The same one Weinberg thought should have been commercialized by the U.S. back in the 1970s.
But what’s truly amazing is that to this day, the outdated 1950s PLWR and its close cousin, the boiling water reactor (BWR), are still used by almost all civilian nuclear power stations built in the West. Not just in existing powerplants, but in proposed new-construction powerplants as well. And what’s worse, there’s a widespread perception in the nuclear power industry that the PLWR design was carefully chosen after a close evaluation of all the available designs, and that only after a careful evaluation based on merit, it was scientists and engineers who decided the light water reactor designs were the best choice for civilian nuclear energy. They actually teach that propaganda in Western nuclear engineering university programs, despite that the inventor of the PLWR clearly debunked these myths in his book, The First Nuclear Era.
To solve Energy Transition and Climate Change, we need to focus on the very best, most suitable reactor designs. The Thorium Breeder described above is one very important design that offers great safety benefits over LWRs. Another important design is the High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor, sometimes called a pebble bed reactor. The reason high-temperature reactors are important to Energy Transition is that they are ideally suited to Hydrogen production. For various reasons beyond the scope of this post, Hydrogen is super-important to solving the liquid fuels problem in Energy Transition.
China fully understands all of this. They’ve already built both Thorium Breeder reactors and high temperature gas cooled reactors. They’ve already announced their intention to power container ships with Thorium-fueled molten salt reactors. They clearly understand the importance of Hydrogen, and they’ve already put at least one full-scale high-temperature reactor in service in support of hydrogen production.
Simply put, China is already doing everything we should have been doing decades ago, while the U.S. Government continues to ignore the need to adopt the more advanced nuclear reactor designs which were proven to be superior to LWRs decades ago.
Why Light Water Reactors (LWRs) can’t possibly get us through Energy Transition
LWRs waste 95% of the Uranium fuel they consume, and the direct result is that the world has now amassed a quarter-million metric tons of spent nuclear fuel waste. Advanced reactor designs can use almost all the Uranium fuel with much less waste, and really advanced reactors like the one Copenhagen Atomics is now developing can even burn up the spent nuclear fuel waste left over from the reactors of yesteryear and use that waste as fuel!
China is building advanced reactors that do all these things, while we in the west continue to build LWRs based on outdated 1950s technology. What’s worse, a shocking number of people who work in the nuclear power industry have been duped by the propaganda that light water reactors were carefully chosen as the optimal design for civilian power generation through some sort of careful selection process run by scientists and engineers. This simply isn’t true, and China is making great progress adopting advanced reactor designs while the west continues to approve only LWR designs for new nuclear power stations.
Again, according to Alvin Weinberg, the guy who invented the PLWR, it was chosen because it fit in the hull of the nautilus submarine, and it was then standardized for civilian power because it was proven to work in the submarine. End of story. There was no selection process based on merit.
The world’s biggest producer of natural uranium is Kazakhstan, and Russia is the leader in uranium conversion and enrichment. If the current geopolitical situation escalates to the point the West is cut off from Russian conversion and enrichment services, the West will struggle just to produce and enrich enough uranium to fuel its existing fleet of LWRs. Making enough fuel to supply a whole new fleet of reactors for Energy Transition would be out of the question if that new fleet of reactors were based on outdated 1950s LWR technology which is still the norm in the West.
Let’s tie this all together now: We rely on Russia and Kazakhstan for most of our nuclear fuel and enrichment services. All the civilian power reactors in service, under construction, and proposed are designed to waste 95% of the fuel they consume, producing even more nuclear waste. Meanwhile, China is making great strides forward adopting advanced reactor designs which are far more fuel-efficient, based on design research our parents and grandparents’ tax dollars paid for in the United States, but which the U.S. Government has not allowed to be adopted for power generation in the United States. That’s the state of nuclear energy policy today in the West, and it’s a sad state of affairs!
Rays of hope from a Defiant private sector
Whatever became of the Thorium-fueled Molten Salt Reactor designed in the 1960s by Weinberg’s team at ORNL? That’s the design I mentioned earlier that eliminates fuel rod meltdown and hydrogen explosion risks—the exact problems that caused the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima accidents? Whatever became of the reactor design that solved all those problems and which also uses Thorium fuel which is far less likely to be repurposed for bomb making?
The Thorium breeder reactor only needs to be fueled with low-enriched uranium just once, and it’s a relatively light fuel load. This is known as “kick-starter fuel”, and it’s used to begin the nuclear fission chain reaction and sustain it until the reactor has bred enough Uranium-233 from Thorium to refuel itself without requiring any more uranium fuel. So the Thorium breeder is far more suitable for large-scale deployment than the LWR designs that continue to be standard in the West.
China has recognized and embraced the value of this design and has already announced its plans to use it to power containerships. But sadly, most of the Western nuclear power industry continues to ignore this far superior design because Western regulators don’t understand it, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency is such a colossal bureaucracy that most experts agree there is little chance they would ever approve a Thorium liquid-fueled molten salt reactor for civilian power generation unless there were some sort of directive from the President to put more priority on adoption of advanced reactor designs.
Just in the past few years, however, we’re seeing rays of hope in the West. A small cottage industry is forming, and more than a dozen startup companies around the world are working right now to catch up with China on commercialization of Thorium-fueled molten salt reactors which were first pioneered at Oak Ridge in the 1960s. But they face an uphill battle persuading Western regulators to approve such advanced designs, and that, in turn, makes institutional investors very hesitant to invest in these startups.
Because institutional capital doesn’t want to touch companies building machines that regulators don’t appear to be ready to approve for operation, this small cottage industry is, for the most part, comprised of pet projects of billionaires who are so passionate about saving the world from the coming global energy crisis that they’re moving forward to do the “right thing” despite the government’s failure to recognize and adopt appropriate policies. One example is Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ Terra Power and its “Natrium” molten salt reactor. They’re literally betting the farm on the assumption that an energy crisis will eventually force our government to do the right thing in the end and approve the same class of advanced reactors that China is already building and putting in service, despite the Western regulators’ six-decades long track record of failed nuclear energy policy.
One of these startups, Copenhagen Atomics, is already building a prototype of an even more advanced Thorium breeder reactor, which doesn’t need any uranium fuel at all. Instead, it can use reprocessed spent nuclear fuel waste from the existing LWR reactor fleet, and consume that waste as kick-starter fuel to begin the fission chain reaction that will ultimately breed enough Uranium-233 from Thorium to fuel the reactor indefinitely.
Copenhagen Atomics’ plan to burn nuclear waste from the light water reactors of yesteryear as kick-starter fuel marks a profound advance in reactor technology because it not only eliminates the need to consume more enriched uranium fuel, but it also provides a solution to get rid of accumulated nuclear fuel waste that would otherwise have to be stored for 100,000 years! But while this strategy is nothing short of brilliant in terms of efficiently fueling Energy Transition, it faces serious regulatory roadblocks from Western regulators.
The reprocessed spent nuclear fuel waste contains several isotopes of Plutonium. It’s known as reactor-grade Plutonium, and it can’t be used to make a bomb. But guess what? The current regulations (which were drafted decades ago) make no distinction between weapons-grade plutonium and reactor-grade plutonium. In the eyes of the law, plutonium is plutonium, and it’s all treated as Level 1 nuclear material that’s assumed to pose a serious weapons proliferation risk.
So under the current laws, if Copenhagen Atomics wants to rid society of the unwanted nuclear waste accumulated over the last six decades by deploying their WasteBurner Thorium-fueled molten salt reactors all across Africa (where cheaper electricity is desperately needed for humanitarian reasons), those actions would be seen as legally equivalent to exporting nuclear warheads to those countries! Again, the reactor-grade plutonium contained in the waste Copenhagen Atomics wants to burn as kick-starter fuel can’t be used to make a bomb. But it’s still plutonium, and plutonium is at the top of the list of controlled nuclear materials. These laws were drafted for good reason decades ago, but have fallen badly out of sync with current needs of society. No effort is underway to reform or update them.
So believe it or not, despite having designed and prototyped a new reactor that could rid the world of its unwanted nuclear waste, Copenhagen Atomics is now more likely to use low-enriched Uranium as kick-starter fuel, for sake of regulatory compliance. And that low-enriched uranium fuel must be enriched by someone, somewhere, in centrifuges which really could be re-purposed for weapons development if they fell into the wrong hands. The laws are clearly out of date, but the ability of a small startup like Copenhagen Atomics to lobby for reform is effectively nil.
Speaking of Uranium-233…
Recall that Uranium-233 doesn’t occur in nature. It can only be bred from Thorium in a special breeder reactor, through a very expensive process. But even in pure form (100% Uranium-233 with no Uranium-238 adulterants), it’s still so unstable and impractical to make a bomb from the stuff that the Manhattan Project rejected Uranium-233 from consideration. Alvin Weinberg’s later research on weapons proliferation would conclude that even if you handed a terrorist an ample supply of pure Uranium-233, it would be easier to make a bomb by discarding the Uranium-233 and figuring out a way to enrich Uranium-235 to weapons grade. So Uranium-233 really doesn’t post any proliferation risk of consequence.
This would seem to open a new door of opportunity: Instead of using spent nuclear fuel waste from the aging LWR fleet as kick-starter fuel, companies like Copenhagen Atomics could instead produce Uranium-233 in breeder reactors, and use that Uranium-233 as kick-starter fuel for their Thorium-burning molten salt reactors. That doesn’t help get rid of the 250,000 tons of accumulated nuclear waste Copenhagen’s founders imagined ridding the world of, but at least it offers a safe way to fuel a Thorium reactor fleet with kick-starter fuel that can’t practically be used for bomb-making.
And what’s more, the United States is in a leading position on Uranium-233, having produced more than a ton of pure Uranium-233 in past research programs. That ton of Uranium-233 owned by the U.S. government is the only substantial cache of this material in existence anywhere on Earth! Remember, Uranium-233 doesn’t occur in nature and can only be produced from Thorium using a special breeder reactor.
Using that ton of Uranium-233 to fuel the first several Thorium reactors and then establishing a program to breed more from Thorium to fuel the rest of the fleet would be a fine plan, except for two little problems. First, Uranium-233 is designated a Level 1 nuclear material, just like weapons-grade plutonium, despite that the Manhattan Project rejected it as impractical to make a bomb from. Second, the U.S. Department of Energy, in its infinite wisdom, already has a plan for that immensely valuable ton of Uranium-233 in storage: They play to spend half a billion dollars of taxpayer money to effectively destroy it by down-blending it with Uranium-238! Then they plan to dump it in the desert to get rid of it. Your tax dollars at work.
The ”Triple-Nuclear” Pledge in Context
Twenty-five nations signed a pledge at the COP28 conference in Dubai in late 2023, promising to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Several nuclear experts have already opined that this is a very ambitious plan, assuming that more LWRs will be built based on designs such Westinghouse’s flagship AP1000. Because LWRs waste 95% of the uranium fuel they consume, it’s doubtful that the uranium mining, conversion, and enrichment industries could ramp up production quickly enough.
But despite seeming like an ambitious goal, tripling nuclear capacity isn’t enough to make a meaningful dent in solving Energy Transition. To fully replace all the energy we get from fossil fuels today would require increasing current nuclear capacity not just by 3 times, but by 28.3 times! There’s no way we could possibly build 28 times more large-scale conventional LWR nuclear plants by 2100, never mind by 2050. And even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to produce enough low-enriched uranium to fuel them. And even if we found a way, the result would be that we’d continue to amass nuclear waste at a rate 28 times greater than we currently do.
In contrast, moving to a Thorium fuel cycle kick-started with reprocessed spent fuel waste could eliminate all the nuclear waste presently in storage by 2050, and we could realistically build enough electric generation capacity that way to fully solve Energy Transition, curing humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels with safer, cleaner, modern reactor designs. But that’s illegal, at least for now, and there are no efforts underway to reform those laws.
Nuclear Energy still costs too much and takes too long to build! I’ll address that in my next post.
Even if we fixed the broken regulations and opened the door to solving energy transition and simultaneously ridding the world of nuclear fuel waste, it would still cost too much. To truly solve energy transition, we need to figure out how to make safe, clean nuclear energy cost less than energy from fossil fuels costs today. We also need to figure out how to build nuclear power stations much more quickly and efficiently than we do today. So my next post will focus on exactly how we could accomplish those goals, and why it’s not happening today.