This interesting legislation has been introduced in the US Senate today by Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Harry Reid, with the intention to amend the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 to provide support for nuclear power generation using thorium nuclear fuel cycles.
It’s said that the thorium deposit in Lemhi Pass, Idaho contains 600,000 tonnes of thorium. Australia’s total identified thorium resources are put at 452,300 tonnes which Geoscience Australia estimates are extractable at less than US$80 per kilogram of thorium.
Just considering the Lemhi Pass thorium and Australia’s thorium reserves, alone, we have 1,052,300 tonnes of thorium available - not to mention all the uranium.
A thorium nucleus has a mass of 232 amu, obviously. Let’s assume that the energy ultimately yielded from each nucleus is 200 MeV, and the thorium is transmuted, and its energy harnessed via U-233 fission, with an overall efficiency within the reactor of 75%, and a further 50% of the energy is lost in a Brayton-cycle engine. Then, we can work out that one tonne of thorium gives about exactly one gigawatt-year of energy.
Current world electricity demand is estimated at a total of about 16,330 TWh. At current consumption, then, this 1,052,300 tonnes of thorium could supply all the world’s electricity needs, all of it, for an astonishing 5650 years.
Monday, 09 March 2009 19:42 | 
Author: Administrator | 
