OPINION | DAVID HESS
Re-thinking thorium
Thorium advocates have not always helped the nuclear cause,
but despite this we should embrace the possibility of thorium contributing to a diversified and more resilient nuclear fuel cycle in the future
David Hess, Senior VP DeepGeo “
HAVE YOU HEARD OF THORIUM!?” said the internet commenter, said the friend of a friend, said just about every contrarian whose interest in nuclear energy had led them to Google what was wrong about it, and then latch on to the first magic solution they
stumbled across. A decade or so ago this was a big problem and made it difficult to have serious conversations about the need for nuclear. At that point in time, in the aftermath of a major accident, the nuclear renaissance had stalled and dialogues on nuclear energy were not exactly top of the political agenda. Thorium was an ideological, technological distraction from problems which primarily needed political will and policy-based solutions – or so the nuclear industry mostly believed.
Whenever public discussion did take place and the classic nuclear objections invariably arose – safety, waste,
proliferation – up would pop a thorium fan to convince you that some kind of cold-war conspiracy had led to the widespread adoption of uranium-based light water reactor technologies. They would then tell you that meltdown- proof, non-weaponisable thorium reactors were already proven, and all that was needed was someone brave enough to break free of big uranium and lead a bold new design to market. While nominally nuclear advocates, thorium fans would
©Alexy Kovynev
typically argue that countries would be crazy to invest further in today’s uranium-based reactors when tomorrow’s thorium technologies were just around the corner and capable of solving every problem. They were happy to throw the existing nuclear industry under a bus and seemed to genuinely believe that the challenges of conventional uranium-fuelled nuclear power were both serious and essentially unsolvable. At the same time thorium fans were incredibly willing to believe outrageous things about the technical readiness of their own chosen reactor technologies and fuel cycle, and equally ready to gloss over any limitations. To question just one talking point, how proliferation-proof is thorium really when you need to breed it to fissionable U-233 before you can even get energy out of it? To question another element of thorium lore, how easy can it be when the one country still recently championing a thorium fuel cycle and with the largest thorium reserves, India, has experienced well-known difficulties and seems to be changing course? It is probably for the best that thorium fans came across as fringe, as such assertions lack credibility. Without having plants in operation all the associated
“We’re not die-hard uranium or thorium fans. We’re engineers, we’re simply fans of what works”
12 | March 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
problems that come with real infrastructure, fans of paper-based thorium technologies were of course free to imagine away any and all such limitations. They were in essence techno-utopians, an early and extreme version of the mindset that characterises the innovators which have since swept the nuclear industry, and which most of us now feel quite comfortable with. Will tomorrow’s reactors be fundamentally better than today’s reactors? Why of course they will! Only a terminal cynic (or an anti-nuke) believes that the future will be worse than the past.
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