To Infinity…and Beyond

By Justin Langley
Contributing Writer

Over the last 100 years, the world has shrunk considerably. Consider what a person from 1900 would say upon seeing the world today? For thousands of years we’ve battled against nature and ourselves over seemingly unlimited resources the Earth has provided, but only in the last hundred has the curve of human progress started to resemble a nearly vertical slope. If we want to continue that progress, we’ll need to find a source of energy that exceeds fossil fuels in every regard. It’s worth noting here that nearly all energy and even every bit of matter around us comes from the sun or stars like it. All of the elements that make up our planet and life itself were forged in a dying star. We are literally made up of stardust. But I digress. All energy that we use is energy from the sun: solar, wind, bio, even the oil that we are so dependent on is captured energy from the photosynthesis of algae that was then heated and pressurized within the planet. Of all of the sources of alternative energy available to us, the raw power that drives the Sun itself seems to be the game changer that we need. It’s only a Cold War mentality that’s keeping us from having all the energy we can use and is therefore an ideology that is doing more harm than good. With nuclear power we have tapped into the power that drives the stars and its potentials are nearly limitless.

Technically, stars run on the process of nuclear fusion, or the fusing of atoms of hydrogen which account for 75% of the mass of the universe, to each other to produce heavier and heavier elements and tons of energy which reaches us in the form of heat and light from a distance of almost 100 million miles. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER is our first attempt at sustained nuclear fusion and should be operational by 2019. It’s incredibly promising technology, but is experimental, won’t be online for at least 7 more years, and is based in Europe which, due to the global economic instability, will likely face economic constraints. That leaves us with nuclear fission, which in its most recognizable form (light water reactors or LWR) are large, expensive, wasteful, and in my opinion far too dangerous to continue using let alone transition the rest of the world to. Add to that list that they are only able to use 1% of the available uranium and reserves that are available are dwindling.

Something new is needed, and that’s exactly what fourth generation nuclear power plants are. These types of plants are better in every way, often by hundreds to thousands of times, than traditional reactors. Most importantly, they have the ability to “burn” not only the 1% of uranium currently being used, but also the other 99%, giving us enough power for hundreds of years. Uranium is yesterday’s fuel though. They will also operate on thorium, which is 3X more abundant than uranium. By doing some quick math, that means an increase in fuel supply by 400 times the currently used fissile uranium. If nuclear waste concerns you… worry no more! Generation IV reactors can also “burn” spent nuclear fuel from earlier generation plants, leaving behind far less waste that decays after a period of several hundred years instead of thousands. In doing so, it’s also turning some of that waste into some of the rarest and most expensive metals on Earth through what is called transmutation. Anybody familiar with alchemy, the forerunner of modern chemistry, might recognize the term transmutation as the age old attempt of alchemists to turn lead into gold and hence unlimited wealth. Modern day nuclear physicists might as well be called alchemists because they have already created gold and far more precious materials using nuclear reactors.

So, that all sounds great,  but what about safety? Current LWRs use pressurized water to cool them which, if cooling systems are lost, are prone to boil off radioactive steam and release it into the atmosphere. Nuclear reactors themselves aren’t prone to exploding, only the coolant systems. Many designs of fourth generation plants remove this risk by not using water as a coolant as well as having passive and convective cooling mitigating the risk to a pile of “hot” glass in a worst case scenario. The spread of nuclear weapons is also a major safety concern posed by nuclear power. However, because of the range of possible fuels available for new reactors, “poisoning” the fuels to make them unusable in weapons manufacturing becomes possible. If these proliferation safe reactors can be built in countries such as Iran, it eliminates any legitimacy of nuclear programs that can secretly be used to create weapons.

If all of these improvements over what is typically considered the downside of nuclear power weren’t enough, it gets better still. Because new designs are capable of higher operating temperatures, they can be used with much higher efficiency electric generators as well as having enough “waste heat” to do things like desalinate water, create hydrogen and fertilizers such as ammonia, turn waste from paper, plastics, sewage, and biomass into synthetic oils, and even process our currently available hydrocarbon based fuels in a much cleaner way. Plus all of this becomes possible at a fraction of the cost and can be used interchangeably without major redesigning of the reactors. Combining all of these technologies gives us the ability to create a sustainable feedstock of chemical compounds as well as rare elements that will be able to adapt to whatever our energy future might be. The transformative effect that next generation reactors will have on the global economy cannot be overstated. If China’s meteoric rise to a global economy was an indicator of what can be done with current technologies, imagine what we could do with this… Its estimated that there would be enough nuclear fuel for at least another thousand years. I challenge us to try using it within 100 years and see what effect that would have on world hunger and poverty.

The flip side of this is that for every year that this technology is not brought to market, how many people are needlessly starving and dying? It’s an unfortunate truth that in our society, the disadvantaged are the first to feel the pains of socioeconomic turmoil and this is as true in the United States as it is in the rest of the world. Instead of our current atomization of people into smaller and more radical ideologies and frustration, we need to unite in getting the technologies that the world needs as soon as possible. Once we do that, we may very well be able to turn our attention to the skies and beyond. Many of the designs for fourth generation reactors are actually based on working prototypes that were built and operated almost 50 years ago and are currently being deployed in countries outside of the United States. If the United States is going to remain relevant in a world that it helped shape, we need to get in the game in a big way, both in nuclear fission and fusion technologies.

Note: One of the products of thorium salt reactors is xenon which can be used in a new type of rocket called VASIMR currently being tested on the space station. This new rocket design can be used to lower the travel time for Earth to Mars trips from about six months to a matter of weeks. Flibe Energy and Ad Astra Rocket Company are companies that make one of the most promising fourth generation reactor designs as well as the VASIMR engine, respectively. Both companies were founded by ex-NASA employees. Next week I will cover what potentials await in the final frontier.

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