Small Thorium Reactors are Coming to Europe (Patreon)

[This is a transcript.]

Phasing out nuclear power is the dumbest thing the Germans have ever done.  Each time I say this on twitter, people come and tell me that Hitler did a few things that were even dumber.  I disagree. Hitler wasn’t dumb, he was evil, he knew full well what he was doing. I’m not at all sure the current German government knows what it’s doing, and that isn’t a good thing either.

The German opposition to nuclear power is especially curious as our next door neighbours, the French and Dutch have no hesitation to use nuclear power to its full potential. Indeed, companies in both countries recently teamed up to bring small thorium reactors to Europe. Let’s have a look at what’s new.

The news is that two companies, Naarea of France and Thorizon of the Netherlands, have signed a partnership agreement to work on thorium fuelled small nuclear reactors. Thorizon, as the name indicates, specializes on using Thorium as nuclear fuel.  Naarea is already working on small nuclear reactors, and they want to combine their technology with the Thorium cores from the Dutch.

In case you’re wondering what their logo  is supposed to show, that’s a radish.  Yes, a radish. Because, as they explain on the website:  “The radish is a root vegetable that leaves no waste, as the entire plant is edible.”  I looked it up and you know what it turns out that radish leaves are indeed edible, I had no idea. Ok, but back to nuclear power.

Small modular rectors have in recent years received a lot of attention. The idea is that rather than building one huge and expensive nuclear plant at location, you build smaller reactors that can then be transported to the place you want them. That they’re modular means you can combine them to get a higher power output.   Saying that they’re small is maybe somewhat of an overstatement.  Not like you an put them into your pocket, but they’re just about small enough to be put onto a truck and be transported on the road.

Small modular reactors could solve two big problems with current nuclear power, which is that nuclear power plants are expensive  and take a long time to build.  Though if the small reactors really solve these problems,only time will tell.

 The two companies who have signed this agreement say they want to be catering in particular to the industry where such a reactor wouldn’t be connected to the public electric grid. This makes a lot of sense because that way they can be put to use even faster.

Suppose you have some energy intensive process in the manufacturing industry. Just take the factory off the grid,  plug it onto a modular reactor,  and the carbon footprint goes down dramatically, regardless of what the rest of the country does. You can also use the heat from the reactor directly, rather than making electricity from it first, which improves efficiently.

The two companies each produce somewhat different reactors though,  Naarea is working on what they call an extra small nuclear reactor that will generate roughly 40 Megawatts of electricity, and they hope it’ll be done by 2030. Thorizon  is working on a reactor with roughly 100 MegeWatts that is targeted at larger industrial customers. They want to have a pilot system ready before 2035.

But let’s talk a little more about those thorium reactors.  Almost all currently operating nuclear reactors run on uranium. The only exception is one reactor in China which runs on thorium, though there are a few small test projects in the works.  There are also some reactors, like the CANDU reactors, can run on either thorium or uranium though they all currently do run on uranium.

 Thorium has attracted attention in the past decades as an alternative nuclear fuel because in Earth’s crust it’s about 3 to 4 times more abundant than uranium. It also can’t be as readily used for nuclear weapons, though if you make some effort that’s still possible.

The real advantage is of thorium  reactors is however that they can use essentially the entire thorium, not just a small fraction of it, as is the case with the normal uranium reactors. This, I assume, is why Naarea has the radish  as a symbol, though maybe it means that their reactors will be red with green leaves on top, you never know.

That the thorium can be used almost entirely means that thorium reactors produce more energy from the same amount of fuel as uranium.  As a consequence, thorium could last for thousands of years.   Thorium is also a waste product of the rare-earth mining industry, so trying to put it to use is a good idea. The downside is that since there is currently no dedicated thorium mining,  it might go into short supply quickly, so there’s some commercial challenges ahead.

The small nuclear thorium reactors work not with solid fuel rods,  but with the fuel dissolved into a liquid salt. This is why they’re called “molten salt reactors”.  Modern molten salt reactors as all newer reactors come with passive safety features. This means that in the case of a loss of power oxygen masks will drop out from the panel above your head. Just checking if you’re listening. In the case of a loss of power, the nuclear fuel will be automatically dumped  into a place where it will cool rather than, in earlier reactors, go on to heat up and potentially cause the core to melt.

That said, nuclear power is still dangerous,  and I fully understand that many people are opposed to the technology because of the risk. However, everything has risks, and I think one also needs to take into account the risk of not using nuclear power because that means continuing to use other sources of energy  which also have risks. Nuclear power technology has changed a lot in the past 50 years  and I really think Germany is missing the bus by not investing into it. So in case you’re from the German parliament, denkt nochmal drüber nach.

Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow.