The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ask Peter Zeihan: Can Thorium Solve the Nuclear Problem?

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Thorium is a potential substitute for uranium-based nuclear power, but will it solve our nuclear problems? If thorium could help with the proliferation of plutonium and make it harder to create weapons on the backend, adoption of more nuclear power might be easier....but thorium isn't our knight in shining armor. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ask-peter-can-thorium-solve-the-nuclear-problem

Hey, everybody, Peter Zion here, coming to you with the most recent in our Ask Heeter series. Today, the question is about thorium power. Now, there's uranium-based nuclear power. Thorium is a potential substitute. It's a different element, different chemical process. And according to its promoters, thorium is better because it is more difficult to turn into nuclear weapons on the back end. So if you can remove a lot of the proliferation concerns of a uranium power cycle, then maybe we can get rid of some of the obstacles to adopting nuclear power on a broader scale. The short version is probably not, but to understand that, you have to understand how uranium works. So, when you mine uranium, you get something that is basically orb where a very small percentage of it is usable.

Uranium decays over time, over decades, over centuries over millennia, and you only get a few tenths of a percent of it that is actually the stuff that you need. So what you have to do is you have to mill it to get rid of all the stuff you don't need at all. And you're left with raw uranium in a form that they call yellow cake, which is a powder. And then you complex that in a compound called uranium hexafluoride, which is solid at room temperature. So you then heat it up a lot and throw it into a gas centrifuge where you spin out the different isotopes. When nuclear material degrades, half-life, all that good stuff, it comes up with different. atomic weights and by putting it into a gas chamber and centrifuging it down you can increase the cut of the part that is actually fissile that you can use to achieve an

atomic reaction and in the case of a civilian power system you're after something between three and a half and five percent roughly everyone has their own preferred mix but that's usually the range now once you have that kind of enriched fuel you then compound it into a structure like a fuel rod, and then that goes underneath their power reactor where it goes through fission. The fission generates heat, the heat dries turbines, the turbines generate the electricity. That's grossly oversimplified. That's basically how it works. Okay. On the back side, when you have a spent fuel rod, what has happened is that the uranium, that is the fizzle component, has changed, and now its waste material is plutonium.

And people can take the plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods and make plutonium-based nuclear weapons. Now, if you're going to do something with thorium, the problem is it doesn't make it too much better. Plutonium is still the byproduct. And while you don't generate as much plutonium from the use of thorium in your nuclear reactor as you do from uranium, you still get some. In addition, you need a different kind of reactor. The fuel rod fabrication system is different. The purification system is different. nuclear power reactor different system is different.

So in exchange for doing a completely new fuel cycle, in a completely new power cycle, you're only getting like a quarter less plutonium. Now, yes, it's in a slightly more complicated chemical mix. Does require a little bit different equipment, a little bit more skill in order to extract a thorium-based plutonium byproduct. But the people who are making nuclear weapons

aren't doing it for economic reasons. And if you have a standard, gigawatt uranium-based nuclear power system, you're going to generate enough waste plutonium every year to make about six to 12 crude plutonium devices. We do this with thorium. You might only have enough for four to ten. It's a marginal difference, honestly. So it's an interesting technology, and for countries like India who have a lot more thorium

than they do uranium, it's probably worth exploring just for power sake. but it's not going to solve anything on a non-proliferation issue. Neither is it a silver bottle that will solve the nuclear industry's problems. The big issues you have with the nuclear industry in addition to proliferation, or you've got the spent waste you have to do something with. Now, in a uranium-based fuel cycle, you can recycle those rods, but doing so extracts the plutonium. And so now you've got plutonium sitting around in probably civilians' hands,

which is one of the reasons why in the United States, We, for the most part, don't reprocess it. During the Cold War kind of work, because the military could take that plutonium away, but now the military has been slimming down its nuclear arsenal for decades. Demand just isn't there. There is no other use for plutonium, really. It's at least not in the volume that it produces this stuff. And so you're left with a waste disposition issue.

Now, other countries have addressed this, if that's the right word, by having some sort of government facility where most of this stuff is goes. and is interred or is mixed with glass or buried or whatever. None of these things really solve the problem, but they at least address them. In the United States, we've got something called Yucca Mountain, which is a big storage facility, but it's completely oversubscribed already, which means in the United States, right now, all that spent fuel unprocessed typically is stored all on the reactor site in a coolant pond, which I would argue is not the best idea.

But until we get a couple acts of Congress that either deal with the reprocessing in the plutonium extraction and or create a fundamentally new storage facility that can handle all of the volumes that we need to handle, we're kind of at a stalling point with the nuclear industry in the United States. Barring the development of fundamentally new technologies, of which there are a few interesting ones in play, we're actually going to be seen nuclear power fall drastically as a percentage of our all-fuel mix. It's about 20% of the total for the last few decades, but we've only had one new plant come online since 1973, and pretty much all of them are going to be decommissioned over the next 15 to 20 years, which we may have questions over

whether that's a smart thing to do, but these facilities are a half-century-old plus, which means that with all the solar and wind, assuming it's working perfectly, we're really just going to be standing still when it comes to generation of electricity, much less decarbon is. organization. So this is a piece of the puzzle that we really do need to fix. And it really does require action from Congress. So I have very low hopes that that's actually going to happen, and I'm afraid that thorium isn't going to get us any closer. Sorry. Bye.