POWER TO CHANGE AUSTRALIA AND THE WORLD.
Never heard of thorium? Most of us haven’t.
Yet this previously unfashionable and under-valued silvery white metal, naturally abundant in the rocks ands soil of many countries, is at the leading edge of the Australian economy’s next great leap forward – the vital ingredient in a revolutionary new way of generating electricity, destined to change billions of lives throughout this century.
Why have Australian scientists and our government been so slow to discuss its existence and explain its potential?
Physics Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, says that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.\
In his patented reactor, energy is produced by the controlled interaction of thorium with an unenriched form of uranium in which the dangerous key weapons-fissile ingredient, plutonium, plays no part.
Previous recipients of the Nobel Laureate for Physics have included Albert Einstein and Pierre and Marie Curie.
A independent CERN study has found that the Accelerator Driven System he has patented will produce power at least three times more cheaply than coal and 4.8 times more cheaply than natural gas.
Australia, once more the Lucky Country, holds 31% of the world’s uranium reserves, almost three times next highest Kazakhstan’s 12%. Most countries have little or none.
We share with India, each with 300,000 tonnes, and the US 400,000 tonnes, the planet’s largest estimated reserves of thorium – in Australia alone enough to sustain well over a century of worldwide power generation.
The new technology can’t be imposed on existing electricity generators. Its operation takes place in seamless stainless steel units which demand sophisticated design and production – potentially a lifeline for our presently troubled steel industry.
For complicated reasons, the technology has been long in preparation; but now sensed remarkable in its worldwide promise.
A growing body of noted scientists in many countries believes it will prove to be uranium’s benign successor, year by year supplanting most other forms of energy generation – slashing costs, demonstrably safely, and totally without CO2 emissions and carbon particle fall-out.
Rubbia’s system also includes a molten-salt safety feature. If its seamless steel generator should overheat, a small plug melts, liquid drops onto a plate and the generator automatically switches off and “saves itself.”
Experts say that had the thorium technology been present at Fukushima, Japan’s devastating radiation fall-out and accompanying hydrogen explosions could not have occurred.
China is racing to own the thorium technology and to market it to the world. Australia, with the chance to build yet another stream of national wealth, has appeared virtually asleep.
In India and China, the products of the thorium revolution are expected to be large installations supplying major cities and industrial centers.
But both countries are also aiming to develop generators capable of servicing small towns and remote locations still without electric power.
These will be variations of generators powered by conventional uranium technology already installed in the naval vessels and submarines of China, the US and other major powers. They may be installed below ground, sealed to operate for up to 10 years virtually unattended and safe from the possibility of terrorist or aerial attack.
One of the Thorium technology’s major benefits will be the ability to bring electricity affordably to remote centers and even large individual rural properties. Over future years, it has the potential to begin to electrify Africa and many other disadvantaged nations.
Because of their steel-encased safety features, the thorium breeder reactors will almost certainly be simpler and less expensive to build and operate than the heavily-protective concreted plants used to generate power in France and some 30 other countries now relying on uranium for most or some of their electricity supply.
Like most great world-challenging ideas, the thorium solution has attracted early critics. The wealthy French uranium industry, which sells its surplus power profitably to surrounding countries, determinedly disparages it. The French argue that their generators’ fallout hazards are overstated. But Germany has decided to abandon its traditional uranium-driven power plants and Japan’s experience has further accelerated public wariness. The number of new conventional straight-uranium generators worldwide has been falling.
Thorium and its energy-generating potential has been around for some 60 years. Why is so little known about its potential?
There are two chief reasons. The concept first came seriously to light in India and in the United States.
In the 1970s America researched it at its Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Dan Ingersoll, senior manager for nuclear technology programs, said “Our tests worked well.”
They were abandoned simply because his laboratory’s budgets had been cut and it was decided to allot all resources to the next expansion of conventional uranium-based generation. At the height of the Cold War, these plants offered the advantage of providing plutonium, a potential bomb ingredient.
In India, the concept of a thorium age was introduced in the 1950s by Dr Homi Bhabha, a returning Cambridge graduate, now dead but still revered as India’s “father of the thorium revolution.”
India has done the new technology’s heavy lifting over 60 years, preparing for the time when it would no longer be banned from importing uranium. That barrier largely behind it, it has announced that it plans to produce 30% of its power using thorium-based generation technology by 2050, progressively replacing coal-fired generation. Four hundred million Indians are without electricity.
India’s key power development group employs 16,000 staff across 20 groups amd 90 divisions. Its chief executive says India is planning not for the next 100 years but for the next 1,000.
He says growth will come from breeder reactors, sustainability from thorium.
In specialist science magazines around the world, more and more scientific commentators are convinced that thorium is the threshold to a new global clean energy era likely to last throughout the century and beyond.
Australian science writer Tim Dean, an editor of Cosmos magazine, says thorium promises what uranium never delivered: safe and clean energy and a way to burn up old radioactive waste He says it does so with no possibility of a meltdown; it generates power inexpensively, does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard, a highly respected English commentator, says: “President Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium. And could put an end to the world’s dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years,”
Australia inherits a privileged position; but our awareness of what is ahead seems poor. The consequences of a wrong or limp response could be far-reaching.
As in many such cases, the best guide to the future may be ‘follow the money’. China is racing to own the new market.
This is the moment China has chosen to gain access to 60 years of Indian thorium-based development and know-how.
Late last year Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao unexpectedly announced a $16bn investment deal with India which will open the way to co-operative technology exchanges.
Premier Wen said “There’s enough space in the world for both India and China. We both stand to gain from economic co-operation and trade.”
China has since declared its future strategy more openly. Its Academy of Sciences has announced it will ”seek to become world leader in safe, cleaner and ultimately cheaper networks based on thorium reactors using molten salt technology.”
The announcement exactly replicates the specifications of the Rubbia technology.
China insiders say none of these announcements would have been made without the nation’s leadership and its powerful engineering institutions believing absolutely in the future of the thorium technology.
A new China Nuclear Power City south-west of Shanghai will cover 130 square kilometers and has a reported $US175 billion 10 year budget.
Another center in Guangdong, the Taiwan Clean Energy (Nuclear Power) Equipment Industrial Park, will cover 5.5 sq km and is scheduled to produce CNY22 billion by 2020. Several other centers exist, researching advanced fuel cycles.
Clearly, China sees the thorium technology, as Australia should, as the pacemaker income-earning product category of the century..
Facing much less pressure than India to plug its domestic power gap, China stands to dominate the future export market, selling generators both to developed and undeveloped countries. Its advantage derives from its unique organizational structure – as a China veteran described it to this writer “a nation run by engineers with access to virtually unlimited funds”
Australia needs to act now to ensure that we effectively exploit our raw materials good fortune -- imaginatively and efficiently adding this great emerging market to the minerals, oil, gas and coal industries which have made us one of the world’s wealthiest economies.
Especially, we need to take advantage of the new technology’s ability to rehabilitate and expand our wounded electricity network, a restoration calculated to require more than $A300 billion in today’s money values over 20 years. This is seven times $43 billion, the much debated early estimated cost of the NBN over the same period.
We are unlikely to afford the rehabilitation and expansion of our existing electricity network without maintaining our present revenue streams from coal exports..
India and China see our coal as a humane exchange, maintaining employment and powering the millions of small pumps which raise water for their millions of small farmers’ crops.
In due course our coal exports and their carbon-particle fall-out will wind down of their own accord.
Who now owns the Rubbia patents is no longer transparent.
He is reported to have visited China. The terms of China’s Academy of Science’s announcement exactly follows the specifications of the Rubbia technology.announcement.
It seems remarkable that Australian science does not appear to have gone directly to him to discover the state of play. Nor talked to Aker Solutions, the highly-respected global provider of services across energy, environmental, mining, metals and oil, whom Rubbia commissioned to routinely complete the engineering and costing details of his vision. Nor to the US Jacobs Engineering Group, a larger Fortune 500 world wide consultancy with annual revenues of billions, which this year acquired Akers’ many technologies at a reported cost of $US913 million.
Initiating these discussions is not a prohibitively expensive task for Australia, which was able to send more than 1000 delegates to the ill-fated Copenhagen summit, and proposes a carbon tax which Gary Johns, a former Keating government cabinet minister, has forecast will cost Australia $1.35 trillion by 2050 “without changing world temperature one iota.”
Thorium Energy Generation Pty Ltd, an Australian research and development company, says the basic cost of bringing an Australian thorium-based prototype to demonstrable operation is probably $100million -- an insignificant comparable expenditure.
Meanwhile, with little publicity, many countries around the world -- as diverse as Belgium, Italy, England, Czechoslovakia, Russia ,USA - have groups working to design patentable generators which may harvest profits from the coming thorium era.
It is apparent that Australia faces two clear and pressing alternatives.
1. Our near-monopoly possession of the world’s biggest reserves of uranium and thorium can make us future trillions of dollars as suppliers of raw materials to the world -- but leave us still vulnerable to the possible threats and whims of powerful international buyers.
2. Our second option is to become a dynamic pioneering innovator of the new technology – the New Switzerland of our region, a nation which maintains its own independence and integrity and builds its wealth and security by efficiently supplying the needs of its customer nations.
New markets go to clear thinkers and fast starters. Need we wait to be followers of other enterprisers and innovators?
All vast infrastructure advances take many years to flower. But the combination of lower price, freedom from pollution, and versatile location is ultimately unbeatable.
On the threshold of a new, more prosperous and safer Australia, we will need to negotiate mutually satisfying relationships with China and India. China notoriously seizes opportunities quickly. Dominant early movers are hard to overtake.
Australia need not be intimidated by the need to design and produce a large range of generators. Let us borrow from America’s innovative past and start with one small, simple sealed installation, our own Model T. It is likely to be the product most likely to catch the world’s imagination in the long haul, because of its flexibility, low-cost and durability.
If government cannot find the finance to bring our Model T to market, let us consider commissioning the big, wealthy, highly-resourced mining companies who have been our guests as they have profited, and also done so much to make Australia’s economy admired
Let us select an expert in government/private finance to help fashion fair and equitable arrangements in the national interest. Let us at once go fact-finding directly to the source, enlisting the advice of Carlo Rubbia, Aker and Jacobs, and our finest steel fabricators now so damaged by the effects of the financial crisis. .
Above all, let us find a restless barrier-breaking project driver with vision, in the mould of World War 2’s Essington Lewis in Australia, Kaiser in the US and Beaverbrook in the UK, determined that we enter the huge coming world market as leaders.
 |
| Carlo Rubia |
 |
